'Tahola Takeaways' - Qonnections 2019

Last week was Qonnections 2019, the Qlik Global Conference and Tahola were in attendance. Ross White, David Fitzgerald, Kabir Rab and Simon Blackbourne flew out to Dallas, to hear the latest and greatest from Qlik’s senior management.

We learnt that we are Qlik's most successful MSP partner in the UK, and this is just the beginning. Our platform is in continual development. If you're interested in our MSP platform and how it could help you to cost effectively deliver analytics in your business, please get in touch.

Here we bring you snippets of our main takeaways from Qonnections 2019.........

Uniform licensing

For those customers running a mix of QlikView and Qlik Sense, later this year you will be able to manage these environments using a single LEF key.

Single architecture

Also available later this year for customers running both QlikView and Qlik Sense, we will be able to offer a single architecture model allowing both applications to be hosted on the same server.

Third acquisition of the year

Qlik have just completed their third acquisition in the last 12 months with the purchase of Attunity. This is in addition to Podium Data now called Qlik Data Catalyst (QDC) and CrunchBot now called Qlik Insight Bot.

Qlik Insight Bot

We got our hands on this brilliant new product and can see huge potential for it.

Insight Bot will be available from June and will enable conversational analytics with Qlik Sense. Users are required to have a Qlik Sense license and Insight Bot will work within Microsoft Teams and Skype as well as Qlik Sense.

New Qlik Sense license

Qlik have introduced a Capacity License model designed for users of Qlik Sense who only use the system infrequently and for short periods of time. With the same functionality as an Analyser license, it allows anonymous use and is charged for based on the amount of time used.

Qlik Dual Use offer

With immediate effect, Qlik have removed the barrier that prevented any QlikView licenses purchase after 1st July 2017 from being included in the dual use offer. From now on, all QlikView licenses can be included when you adopt dual use.

Data Literacy

Organisations are finding data literacy a barrier for adopting, developing and gaining great results and insights using BI. Think of it like reading in the industrial age i.e. only the elite had the skill, but Qlik want to put analytics into the hands of everyone to deliver great results.

With this in mind, Qlik has helped develop The Data Literacy Project to help increase data literacy amongst everyone. The website includes a free assessment and full e-learning platform powered by Qlik Sense, of course. For more details please check out The Data Literacy Project and here to learn of Qlik's approach.

Data strategy

Linked to data literacy is the need to have a data strategy. Qlik suggest that all organisations should have a data strategy in the same way that they have a business strategy. With data now being considered the new “oil” in the modern economy, those organisations with a comprehensive data strategy are likely to see greater success than those without. The purchases of Attunity and Podium (now QDC) are powering this increasing need.

Data storytelling

Another key message from the conference, again aligning with data literacy and data strategy, is one of Data Storytelling. The ability to share complex data in a simple way with your audience in such a way that they can understand, analyse and respond to insights in the data. The ability to present data in this way is further confirmed by McKinsey who have stated that in the USA alone, by 2026 there will be 2 – 4m jobs created in Data Storytelling.

Mobile capability

More and more customers are taking advantage of Qlik's mobile capability using the app. There’s no additional cost for the app and it's available to download from the relevant App Store. Currently only the iOS version allows use of data in an offline mode but this will be extended to Android by the end of the year.

Use of Geoanalytics

Since GeoAnalytics was included within the license model for Qlik Sense, more and more customers have been taking advantage of it. There were many examples of GeoAnalytics used for customer analysis, and hospitality and retail businesses using it for delivery analysis and store location analysis.

Customer experience, analytics & personalisation

Qlik talked about driving increased customer interaction using data. They introduced the concept of the 'interaction DNA', the attributes that reveal a customer's unique preferences, motivations and passions and how these can be used to market to their additional, individual customer needs to drive sales.

SaaS and multi-cloud deployment

Within Qlik Sense there are now a multitude of different deployment options. Qlik Sense is now a true multi cloud solution removing the need for customers to consider the hardware to run Qlik Sense enterprise; instead you can opt to use Qlik's SaaS offering and combine that with your existing set up to extend out if you wish to. Qlik say no other BI vendor is offering this variety of multi cloud deployment options (on-prem, private cloud and Qlik cloud or all 3 combined).

The future of architecture - Kubernetes

Qlik announced their new Kubernetes based architecture. The benefits of Kubernetes are:

• Data connectors - 46+ data connectors out of the box including Big Data Query, Salesforce connector, various social media connectors with more being added
• Cloud hub – This is designed with collaboration in mind, allowing users to share app development and manage them straight out of the hub, making it more intuitive and cutting down on administrative tasks.
• Scaling – One of the benefits of this deployment is scaling the environment with demand.
• Resilience and reliability – Services can be upgraded and run in silos which makes the service more resilient and reliable. Deploying a new service is a matter of minutes not hours.

Qlik Data Catalyst (QDC)

We finally got our hands on Qlik Data Catalyst, Qlik's enterprise data management solution. QDC is a catalogue of data that allows users to shop for trusted, cleansed, up to date data. New data sources can be onboarded, prepped and published to the catalogue in minutes speeding up access and ROI, with users empowered to reuse, extend and share a previously created asset.

Qlik Associative Big Data Indexing (ABDI)

We also got our hands on Qlik's ABDI that allows big data analysis without limits. Do you have a data lake or data source that is too big to bring into memory, but you still want to benefit from Qlik's brilliant associative data model? ABDI reverses the usual process and takes Qlik to the data source enabling you to query billions of rows in seconds. In fact, Qlik demoed ABDI with a data set of 85bn records returning results almost instantaneously.

Qlik Sense App Profiler Released

• Find out what are your most used apps
• Which apps are most complex
• What apps are most compatible with Qlik Sense?

Augmented Intelligence

• New augmented intelligence engine in Qlik Sense
• Supports Insight suggestions & automation
• Machine learning for improved recommendations over time
• Available via APIs

QlikView 11.2 extended support

Qlik announced that extended support for QlikView 11.2 will expire on 31st December 2020. If you haven't upgraded yet and want to discuss your options, please get in touch.

Qlik also gave a sneaky peak into the capabilities we might see in the future:

• Beyond search...
  • We're all used to typing questions into Google and that is the aim with Qlik Insight Bot where you can ask questions to a nicely modelled data set, but Qlik is aiming higher. The long term plan is to have conversational analytics with the data source itself eliminating the need for data modelling. Pairing conversational analytics, AI, machine learning and ABDI to power this.

• More IoT integration
  • If you can think of a way to integrate with IoT devices then it can probably be done.

• Qlik Sense Holographic...
  • Yes, you read that right! Qlik are working on projects to implement Qlik Sense to work with holographic headsets so you can interact with data wherever you are with simple hand gestures. Imagine being on the management team of a shop and sales trends and stock availability of a product are available with a simple hand gesture from the shop floor.

If you would like to find out more about any of the topics above, please get in touch and we'd be happy to share further details with you and explore what it could all mean for you and your business, so please just Get in touch

Tahola at Qonnections 2019

Finally, here are Josh Good's (Sr Director, Product Marketing, Qlik) highlights, he reveals some of his favourite additions to Qlik, that were unveiled at Qonnections this year and why he can't wait for customers to get their hands on them too!