QlikView 12 Released

Qlik has finally released the new version of its business intelligence platform, QlikView 12. The major change in the QlikView 12 compared to QlikView 11 (which was released in 2011) is the data engine. QlikView now uses the same QIX Associative Data Indexing Engine (QIX) that powers Qlik Sense.

Other than the data engine improvement, QlikView also has enhancements in its security and mobile experience. All functions on web client are now available on touch devices without limitations.  Other changes are improved clustering, native connectors to web services and accessibility of Data Market to QlikView.

Qlik has released a new platform, Qlik Sense, in September 2014, after two years without any major release and the release date of QlikView 12 was since awaited by existing users of the platform.

The last major release of QlikView was QlikView 11 released in 2011. Since the company was releasing a new version in every year the expectation was that Qlik (then called QlikTech) would release QlikView 12 in 2012. But QlikView 12 has not been been released or talked about until late 2015.

In early 2013, Qlik started to talk about a new platform called QlikView.Next. It was expected to be the next QlikView but Qlik released the desktop edition of the product in 2014 and renamed it to Qlik Sense.

QlikView.Next is renamed as Qlik Sense because it is not the next version of QlikView. It is a new business intelligence platform. Its data loading and cleansing engine and expression engine seems to be same as QlikView but front end is entirely different:

QlikView is a tool for situations where you want prepared business applications, i.e. applications created by developers who put a lot of thought into the data model, the layout, the charts and the formulae; and deliver the applications to end-users who consume the applications. We call this Guided Analytics. The end-user has total freedom to explore data, select, drill down and navigate in the information, and can this way discover both questions and answers in the data. The end-user is however limited when it comes to creating new visualizations. This type of situation will without doubt be common for many, many years to come. 

Qlik Sense is a tool for situations where you don’t want to pre-can so much. Instead you want the user to have the freedom to create a layout of his own and in it, new visualizations; charts that the developer couldn’t imagine that the user wants to see. You want Self-service data discovery, which means a much more active, modern, engaged user. In addition, Qlik Sense is much easier to use when you have a touch screen, and is adaptive to different screen sizes and form factors. On the whole, Qlik Sense is a much more modern tool.
Source : QlikView and Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is not QlikView 12. In fact, Qlik Sense is not QlikView at all.

My estimation was that they would release a new QlikView version named QlikView 12. And  I was hopefully this new server will support both QlikView and Qlik Sense as front end. For example Access Point of QlikView 12 would display both QlikSense and QlikView applications. I wrote since both Qlik Sense and QlikView have common expression and data engine, it should not be difficult". It seems like this feature is not on the roadmap at all.

What is Qlik Sense?

Qlik Sense is a next-generation self-service data visualization application from Qlik, a leading data discovery platform provider. Launched on September 17th 2014, Qlik Sense empowers everyone to easily create a range of flexible, interactive visualizations that drive exploration and discovery through intuition.

Qlik Sense is a new product and is not QlikView 12. So now basically Qlik offers two BI platforms: Qlik Sense and QlikView. You can read more about the difference between Qlik Sense and Qlik View : Qlik Sense vs Qlik View.

Qlik Sense is built on the QIX Associative Data Indexing engine, the second generation of Qlik’s proven and patented engine technology. Associative Data Indexing allows people to explore data relationships across many sources that would otherwise be hidden in hierarchical or query-based approaches. Qlik Sense drives faster time to insight with intuitive exploration, smart search, and smart visualizations. It broadens knowledge sharing with data storytelling and mobility. And, it promotes accuracy and reliability through enterprise governance capabilities that make it truly world class. Qlik Sense brings out the business analyst in everyone, taking self-service to a new level of power and flexibility, so that businesses are more informed and capable of acting and reacting faster.

Qlik built Qlik Sense to deliver broad value to everyone in an organization, whether working individually, in teams, or globally. With Qlik Sense, users of all types and skill levels get the most flexible, modern solution for self-service data visualization and exploration. And, IT organizations no longer have to trade governance and performance to provide it. Whether simply consuming, exploring and analyzing, creating visualizations, or collaborating – Qlik Sense provides advanced capabilities that delight and empower everyone.

Qlik Sense Overview Video

Associative Data Indexing

The QIX (Qlik Index) engine is the second generation of the proven and patented engine technology that has powered Qlik products for the last decade. It provides associative data indexing and dynamic calculation that empower people to naturally explore using their intuition. Associative data indexing exposes relationships in complex, multi-source data sets that would otherwise be hidden in  hierarchical or query-based approaches. Users benefit from this feedback every time they make selection or search, allowing them to gain understanding and take next steps.

Self-Service Visualization and Discovery

Qlik® Sense offers a cutting edge visualization and discovery experience in a smart, responsive, HTML5 client that allows people to quickly explore information and gain critical insights. Qlik Sense is built to promote the use of human intuition in all areas of the user experience.

Intuitive Exploration and Discovery

Exploration in Qlik Sense is unmatched. People can ask questions anywhere using simple, natural interactions such as selection and search, without restrictions or boundaries. The QIX engine instantly responds after each click, recalculating all analytics and revealing data relationships through easy to understand color cues – green (selected), white (associated), and gray (unrelated). This empowers users to follow their own paths to uncover insights and blind spots across many data sources that would otherwise have been overlooked.

Global Smart Search allows users to search the entire data set using keywords to uncover insights and relationships. Qlik Sense automatically displays the dimensions where the desired values match. And, if multiple values are entered, Qlik Sense will reveal not only the matching dimensions but also the relationships that exist between the values, ranking the results by the strength of the associations. This provides immediate insight regardless of where information is located.

Smart Visualizations

Smart visualizations in Qlik® Sense offer new, innovative techniques for conveying meaning in data. They feature advanced summarization of information, intelligent use of color gradients, and responsive design that adapts information based on screen size. And, because visualizations are automatically integrated with the QIX engine, they are fully interactive and respond to changes in context from anywhere in the app.

User Driven Creation

With Qlik Sense, everyone becomes a business analyst. People no longer have to wait for reports or changes to analysis. They can simply drag and drop to create – without having to wire objects together or write complex SQL queries. Creation in Qlik Sense is progressive; people only get the level of sophistication they want and need. Governed, centralized libraries of data, metrics, and objects facilitate sharing and re-use and promote consistency and accuracy. And, users can quickly load and combine their own data from multiple sources without the need for scripting.

Sharing of Knowledge and Insights

Qlik® Sense is built for people and place, allowing users to share analyses and insights, and work collaboratively in both office and mobile settings.

Collaboration and Communication

Groups and teams can easily collaborate in Qlik Sense to make better decisions. A centralized information hub offers streams of content for different topic areas or workgroups, allowing people to locate valuable content fast, or share relevant analyses for others to use, in an organized controlled manner.

Interactive Data Storytelling allows people to use analytics to create and present guided stories, rich with narrative and graphics, to communicate insights and facilitate discussion. Multiple stories can be created to offer different points of view. And direct, in-context access to live analysis allows for immediate answers to follow-up questions that arise, reducing delays in decision making.

Anywhere, Anytime Mobility

Qlik Sense is inherently mobile, built from the ground up for mobility. Users get full capabilities on any device, including exploration, analysis, creation, and collaboration. A unified, touch based HTML5 client provides intuitive operation, and responsive design intelligently adapts visualizations, data, and functionality to create the best possible experience on any device. With Qlik Sense, people can instantly solve problems anywhere, anytime they arise.

Broad Adoption and Organizational Intelligence

Qlik® Sense offers developers and IT administrators the ideal set of approaches to build, deploy, and govern information and analytics environments. And it does this while ensuring business users retain the flexibility and self-service agility they need.

Customization, Extension, and Data Integration

Qlik Sense can be fully customized to meet unique business needs, offering a complete set of open and standard API’s for building rich analytic apps, embedding visualizations into existing solutions, and extending the functionality of Qlik Sense for new types of visualizations and objects. And these capabilities can be utilized by developers with standard technology skill sets such as HTML5, JavaScript, and .NET.

Qlik Sense offers robust data integration, allowing organizations to cleanse, transform, and unify multiple disparate data sources without requiring external tools or data repositories. Qlik Sense can connect to and combine virtually any data source, including spreadsheets, databases, operational systems, ERP, and web sources. And with Direct Discovery, resident big data sources such as Hadoop, Teradata, and Cloudera can be integrated without requiring data to be loaded into memory.

Enterprise-Class Governance and Performance

With Qlik Sense, organizations benefit from enterprise capabilities not seen in standalone visualization tools. This allows organizations to offer the flexibility of self-service discovery without having to trade-off management, governance, security, or scalability.

The Qlik Management Console (QMC) offers a central point of management and monitoring for all areas of Qlik Sense, including multi-geography deployments. The QMC provides a large set of configuration options for content and resources that drive quicker deployments, efficient and flexible license management, and proper use of applications, objects, and data. It’s web based, responsive, and touch enabled for access on any device.

Qlik® Sense offers a centralized, flexible rules-based security model which provides customized, robust protection for all areas of the product. Administrators can define security rules based on users, actions, resources, and the environment, for all areas of the product. Governed, centralized libraries help to ensure consistency and accuracy of data and analytics across the organization. And dynamic data reduction provides granular control over information access down to the row and column level.

Qlik Sense is built using an elastic scaling architecture that allows for seamless deployment and expansion across geographies. It includes a Deployment Management Console that allows for rapid setup and management of local and cloud environments to support greater capacity and performance. And with the QIX engine at its core, Qlik Sense scales to high numbers of concurrent users and large data sets, offering industry leading high-speed dynamic calculation and performance.

Qlik Sense Pricing

Qlik Sense is available from 17th September 2014. Qlik Sense pricing is also completely overhauled : Qlik has also introduced a new, more flexible token-based licensing model for Qlik Sense to provide greater flexibility for license management. Qlik Sense tokens can be allocated to named users, or leveraged across multiple login sessions for one or more users. With the token-based licensing model, customers can deploy multiple servers, across multiple geographies, to optimize for performance and availability without paying any additional costs.

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