Active Intelligence and the Year of the Tiger

James Fisher expresses smart capabilities of Qlik through Qlik Active Intelligence Platform

For the past couple of years, businesses around the world have been in reaction mode – responding to situations as they arise. But, it finally feels like the tide is changing, and we are now at a point where we are good at planning for and executing contingencies, so we can be deliberate and intentional in our direction, while being adaptable in our path and methods.

A huge enabler of that shift is empowering everyone to use data more proactively. And, we were once again very busy in this space over the last quarter of 2021, introducing capabilities in the Qlik Active Intelligence Platform to help our customers create an end-to-end analytics data pipeline that will enable them to seize the full opportunity of their data. In this new era of deliberate disruption, companies will need to be able to take their data, free it, find it, understand it, and then activate it at the moment to deliver real change.

What Are These Solutions, and Why Are They So Exciting?

I'm going to start with Qlik Forts – a feature of Qlik Sense which extends the value of Qlik Cloud to all of an organization's data, regardless of where it must reside. It provides a seamless experience across clouds, with users having a single point of entry to data and insights, whether data is in Qlik Forts, in Qlik Cloud, or a mix of both. Please join our upcoming LinkedIn Live session to learn more.

Through our acquisition of Big Squid, we added Qlik AutoML (automated machine learning) to our growing portfolio of Augmented Analytics capabilities. Qlik AutoML allows analytics users and teams to easily generate machine learning models, make predictions, plan decisions and be prescriptive on how to drive outcomes – all within an intuitive, code-free user interface.

We also significantly added to our cloud reporting journey with the Qlik Reporting Service – which builds on our investments in self-service reporting earlier this year and brings multiple reporting options to our cloud. Organizations can now quickly assemble, automate and accelerate the burst report distribution of insights from their Qlik Sense applications through various channels, including email, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and Google Cloud Storage. By automating the reporting distribution process, organizations can effortlessly expand analytics reach, decrease repetitive programming tasks, free up key resources, and deliver time to value.

We introduced new capabilities to help users quickly find the data they need and increase confidence that it can be trusted. These came in the form of our new Catalog KPIs and Lineage Connectors. Users can now see at-a-glance how many apps are using particular data and how many times a dataset or app has been viewed. Why is this important? These KPIs help increase data trust by providing an easy way for users to distinguish which data and apps will best meet their needs.

This is on the heels of our earlier release of Impact Analysis – a Qlik Sense capability that enables users to easily understand the complete history (or lineage) of a dataset. Qlik Lineage Connectors expands this capability to also include data that is being used by on-premises applications and multiple other sources, including Qlik Sense apps, Qlik Sense Enterprise Client-managed apps, QlikView apps, and even Tableau & PowerBI apps. Visit this new page on our website to learn more about Qlik's catalog and lineage offerings.

We also launched Automation Templates – a library of pre-built, Qlik-curated Application Automation workflows that users can configure for altering, task chaining, loop and reduce, and reporting to accelerate developer productivity for our customers.

Finally, did you know we have also delivered more than 200 visualization improvements over the past 18 months to help bring data-led insights to life? Our capabilities provide you with the power to create practically any visualization that your use cases require. Delightful, flexible, and scalable visuals, even when using native settings.

Doubling Down on Explainability and the User Experience of Data in the Cloud

These solutions are already being used by customers to build greater trust and ultimately increase data and analytics use for decision-making. And we've got more coming soon including:

Qlik SaaS Catalog Field-Based Lineage – I'm particularly excited about this which will deliver on the promise of the NodeGraph acquisition and highlight the value that Explainable BI can bring. I've written on the importance of improving our understanding of the transformation data has gone through to deliver a particular insight. And with this new solution, users will be able to see the flow of each data field – from original data source to end-user applications – within every data asset that's managed in Qlik Sense.

Hybrid Data Delivery Cloud Sources – Last year, we released Hybrid Data Delivery which was our first cloud data service and a key driver of Active Intelligence by automatically replicating, updating, and cataloging data in real-time from on-premises sources systems into Qlik Cloud without manual scripting or scheduling. We also added Snowflake as a target for real-time data movement. This was the first chapter for this solution and focused on continually streaming data from on-premises enterprise sources, such as relational databases, mainframe systems, and SAP applications to your infrastructure of choice.

The second chapter will expand this range of connectivity to include data from 18 additional cloud databases and SaaS applications, including ServiceNow, SuccessFactors, Workday, and NetSuite. With new elements coming to the Hybrid Data Delivery user experience in SaaS via a unified interface and process for collecting all enterprise, legacy, and cloud data sources for analytics, this is one to watch out for.

Now is the time to take advantage of the Qlik Active Intelligence Platform and the constant innovations enabling you to transform your raw data into informed action and, in turn, dynamically drive disruption.

Author:

James Fisher, Chief Product Officer, Qlik