Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to offer some insights on Qlik drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Qlik and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

Qlik offers Qlik Sense and QlikView products with new developments generally appearing first in the Qlik Sense product line, an offering designed for cloud-based deployments. Qlik uses an in-memory architecture for highly responsive interactive analyses and the products can also be configured for live access to data sources in place. Combined, the products offer a broad range of capabilities for both ad hoc and preconfigured analyses such as dashboards and reports.

The best ranking for Qlik is sixth in the TCO/ROI category. The company does a good job providing tools and documentation to support an TCO/ROI analysis on the benefits of using its products. Its highest rating is in Manageability, where it provides to analysts the means to manage its products from discovery to dashboards. The next highest rating is in Usability, where it performed well in terms of specific usage of its analytics.

The Qlik product line does not offer as much forecasting, planning and predictive analytics as some of the other products we assess here and would benefit from more collaborative capabilities. It also lags in the Adaptability and Reliability categories compared to the other vendors assessed in the Value Index. Better capabilities to integrate Qlik into business processes and other applications would improve its Adaptability score; better metrics and configurability to support scalability across users and data would help improve performance in the Reliability category.

This assessment was based on Qlik Sense June 2018 and QlikView November 2017. Since our evaluation was completed the company released Qlik Sense November 2018 and QlikView November 2018. New features include machine learning, dashboard extensions, visualization enhancements and improved management capabilities.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about Qlik and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director