Highlights from Qlik Qonnections 2018

Here are some of the highlights from Qlik’s annual convention Qonnections 2018 that was held in Orlando, Florida last week. Qonnections is Qlik's global partner and customer conference and one of the industry's premier BI events. 

The conference kick started with the CEO’s keynote speech. Mike Capone didn’t disappoint the audience. He reaffirmed Qlik’s commitment to both QlikView and Qlik Sense. Which is key for customers who have made significant investment in QlikView and are still in the process of evaluating Qlik Sense.

It is important to note that Qlik now has over 48,000 customers, this speaks volumes about Qlik’s leadership in the analytics and business intelligence solutions market. For a small increase in maintenance fee, QlikView users will be able to use the same license for Qlik Sense. This is a clever strategy, due to the fact that 32,000 out of 48,000 customers, still use QlikView. This is something we feel our customers will be relieved to hear. Not least because it will make it easier for QlikView customers to start leveraging the power of Qlik Sense, without incurring considerable upfront investment.

Mike Capone, newly appointed CEO at Qlik, in an interview with Jan Sipek at Qonnections last week commented that, "Qlik has the premier analytics platform. It's not just a tool, but a way to embed analytics into every process within your organisation and create an open scalable platform, this is Qlik's key advantage. It runs anywhere in your cloud, in a private cloud or in multiple environments and that's what makes Qlik special".

The critical part of the platform is still Qlik's Associative engine, but Qlik will now be extending the platform further to work with cognitive technology, machine learning and larger data sets, both inside and outside of an organisations eco-system, these data sets can also be disparate, bringing them together from multiple sources.

Qlik Core, is the new open source development platform built on top of the Qlik Associative Engine. With Qlik Core, you can take advantage of the powerful associative indexing engine from Qlik to build custom data exploration and data visualization solutions.

So lets have a look at the exciting new improvements in the April release of Qlik Sense, that were referenced in the Product Keynote....the Qlik Sense April release will not disappoint. 

Included is their new Accelerated Self-Service capability, which is a collection of features powered by the new Qlik cognitive engine, aimed at streamlining and enhancing the creation experience. 

This includes association recommendations between:

• Data sources
• Chart suggestions based on the data
• Simplified workflows for loading data and building analytics.

In addition, a number of other improvements have been made including:

• A new multi-layer map object based on Qlik GeoAnalytics technology
• New customization options including grid size control
• Improved accessibility
• Self-service publishing in the Qlik Sense hub
• Enhanced EMM support (Airwatch per-app VPN) for Qlik Sense.

Find out more here

What is the Qlik Cognitive engine?

The new Qlik Cognitive Engine was one of the most exciting releases at Qonnections. Here's a video from Mike Tarallo at Qlik, showing you how the Qlik Cognitive Engine streamlines and shortens analytics creation using the April 2018 release of Qlik Sense. 

This is a companion video to go with the following blog, also written by Mike Tarallo.

How to succeed with Data Literacy

Another of the big themes at Qonnections this year was Data Literacy. As data growth continues at a rapid pace, consumers struggle with the ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data.

Dan Sommer and Olof Malmström, explain in this two minute video, what it means and to whom, why the CDO is so important and how you can accelerate self-service to increase data literacy.

Qonnections summary with Qlik's CTO Mike Potter, interviewed by Michael Nordström, CIO at Climber.

The new kids on the block released at Qonnections this year were, Qlik Core and Multi-cloud - In this short video Mike Potter, Qlik’s new CTO summarises their innovation agenda and explains what the core is and what their new multi-cloud strategy enables. 

And finally, the 2018 Qlik Partner Program (QPP) Enhancements were also announced last week. The key thing for Tahola was the official launch of the Managed Service Provider (MSP), this is particularly exciting as it’s the first MSP partner offering in the BI Space, giving us access to the fast-growing cloud-based BI market. 

Tahola are already ahead of the game though and have been an early adopter with our TaholaCloud solution offering, where we already have clients using our pre-built subscription based analytics solution, specifically within the hospitality sector.

If you would like further information regarding TaholaCloud, register now for our forthcoming webinar on the 17th May at 3pm.

Leigh Baillie

Marketing Director

Tahola Ltd

Leigh.Baillie@Tahola.com

+44 (0) 1442 211 122