Published on the 10/12/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Lars Björk, CEO of business intelligence software company QlikView, thinks most business intelligence companies have their thinking upside down…
Software house QlikView wants to harness data and serve it up in a form that can make organisations’ employees – all of them – five percent smarter and CEO, Lars Björk has been critical about how other vendors approach business intelligence.
“We [QlikView] are about taking data and turning it into insightful information. We compete with legacy vendors such as SAS, Oracle, Cognos (IBM). Their due date is passed but that is not recognised in this market as it is in the west. There is a new breed of tools such as Tableau and Spotfire and QlikView. We have an enormous focus on business needs and usability.
“This is about empowering the edge of the organisation. If everyone is five percent smarter that can move a company forward more than just one person having information at the head of the organisation.”
Björk, who spoke to iStart during a visit to Australia to meet customers and prospects, also claims that the tool is much easier to deploy and use than many other business intelligence or analytics packages. “SAS offers a high-end very statistical tool that you need a PhD and a white lab coat to be able to manage. You don’t have to be super-skilled to use QlikView.”
The company claims several hundred organisations use the tool across Australia and New Zealand, including Telstra and NSW Health. Although the company reported that sales in Asia Pacific had been below expectations in the last financial quarter (when it also reported a $US3.4 million loss on revenues of $US104 million) Björk described the issue as a “hiccough”.
He claimed the region was currently underserviced in terms of business intelligence offerings, and predicted it would be QlikView’s fastest growing market in the coming year.
QlikView, which uses an in-memory approach to speed processing, is now finalising a new version of the tool, tipped to be introduced in a beta version in the first quarter of 2014, that Björk suggests will be even simpler to use.
He says it has been designed not just to deliver answers to a particular query. Responding to a question might provide a “sweet spot” of insight but in the process could also generate an information blind spot he said. By providing a visual representation of data QlikView expects users of the system to be able to spot much broader trends or issues.
“We think that the human can see trends, patterns and outliers much better than a computer. We provide more data on an interface that is far more intuitive. This is not about providing an answer to a question but an answer to a question you never knew you had,” Björk says.
