What is QlikView.Next?

Update : After calling it QlikView.Next for a few years, Qlik (formerly known as QlikTech) has changed the name of the new platform to Qlik Sense.

QlikTech has released its last major version upgrade, QlikView 11 almost 3 years ago in November 2011. Since than, there were several service packs and new builts but no new version. And if you are looking forward for QlikView 12, it will never be released. Next version of QlikView will be named QlikView.Next.

According to the information QlikTech has released up to now, QlikView.Next will be fundamentally different than QlikView 11 and its almost identical predecessor QlikView 10. The interactive visualization user experience is completely redesigned in QlikView.Next. QlikTech calls this Natural Analytics which according to them makes it easier for users to discover and share new insights.

Natural Analytics builds on QlikView’s game-changing associative experience and again according to QlikTech incorporates enhanced comparisons, collaboration, workflow, sharing and data dialogs, as well as enhanced insights from unique visualization techniques that Qlik acquired from NComVA in June 2013.

With QlikView.Next, QlikView Server and administration capabilities will also be completely re architectured. QlikView.Next business intelligence software suite will also come with reusable semantic intelligence and modeling that draws on its acquisition of Expressor Software, open APIs for extensibility, expanded data connectivity, and enhanced scalability and security features.

Compared to the offerings of the incumbent IT-centric vendors, QlikView revolutionized business intelligence domain for its ease of use for end users, particularly in terms of its interactive dashboards plus its successful “land-and-expand” strategy. But that was long long time ago. Since 2010 or QlikView 10, QlikTech has released nothing significantly new and also abandoned its land-and-expand strategy by forcing QlikView customers to buy at minimum a QlikView Server instead of desktop licences. And in terms of visual-based interactive exploration and analysis capabilities, user experience, and the time it takes for business users to gain proficiency in authoring, the current QlikView 11.x is more limited compared to offerings from other stand-alone data discovery vendors like Tableau. You can see this in successive Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Reports. In 2012, QlikView was the only “agile” visual discovery platform in “leaders” quadrant among big boys like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. In 2013, Tableau and Spotfire has entered the “leaders” quadrant and now in the latest 2014 edition, you can see that Tableu is clearly ahead of QlikView in terms of ability to execute and on par with it in its completeness of vision. So while QlikTech was pouring all the cash in its marketing juggernaut, it looks like no fund is left for R&D and QlikView became a little obselete in the past 3 years.

What is QlikView.Next?

And almost 1 year long delay in the release of QlikView.Next, which is seen as QlikView’s answer to Tableu’s rise, does not help. QlikView.Next was expected to be released in 2013 (already breaking QlikView’s product release phase of 1 major release in every year) but we have still not seen it yet (except some marketing mumbo jambo about it). This gap of whole year delay has given other vendors to improve their offerings, close the gap and in some major areas supress what QlikView offers.

Currently (as of 2014), our view is that QlikView is the best data visualization leader, closely followed by QlikView. QlikView may be the top business intelligence platform in 2015 if QlikView.Next becomes a success. But it seems like QlikView guys are also planning to shoot themselves from their feet by discontinuing free QlikView Desktop edition at a time Tableau is planning to release a Mac version of its desktop edition. If QlikView.Next does not take of as Qlik expects and Tableau innovates like this, we are pretty sure that 2014 will be the year when Tableau took over the leadership from QlikView.

There were rumors that QlikView Free Desktop will be removed from Qlikview.Next but according to a press release on 9 April 2014, qlikView will still provide free desktop:

Presenting to over 1200 attendees at its Global Partner Conference, Anthony Deighton, Chief Technology Officer of Qlik (NASDAQ: QLIK), a leader in user-driven Business Intelligence (BI), announced that the Company will release a free desktop version of QlikView.Next via Personal Edition download early in third quarter of 2014. Qlik will also offer a free cloud service for small group sharing of analysis built in this desktop client. Personal Edition business analytics users will be able to leverage QlikView.Next’s intuitive features to build a customized app in minutes by just dragging and dropping, experiencing many of the Natural AnalyticsTM user interface capabilities before the server and enterprise functionality of the complete platform is expected to be generally available in second half of 2014.
Source : Qlik Announces Free QlikView.Next Personal Edition Download Will Be Available to the public early third quarter