With over 10,000 customers this Swedish firm is quickly making its way up the Gartner Magic Quadrant.  By plying the underserved departmental niche they are capturing the hearts and minds of business users.  QlikTech received the highest score when asked weather the vendor is viewed as being successful in the organization.  Traditional vendors like MicroStrategy should be concerned with the passion QlikView customers have shown.  Passionate customers evangelize to their peers and soon you may end up seeing an excel like effect.

As purveyors of BI we are all well aware of business users attachment to excel.  Its an environment they are familiar with, easy to use, and ultimately self-service.  Most IT centric BI tools end up being a delivery vehicle for excel.  Even though you can add derived metrics and pivot data in MicroStrategy, analyst will often take the extra time to download and build custom pivot tables in excel.  There are a number of reasons for this but the larger point is that the business community is showing a higher level of intensity with QlikView solutions leading to continued growth in market share.  Its no wonder MicroStrategy announced both in-memory BI and Departmental BI as major capabilities at the recent user conference.

As Gartner points out QlikTech is not architecturally ready for enterprise deployments.  The lack of a unified metadata layer and actual examples of large scale deployments kept them out of the leaders quadrant.  In the coming weeks I’m going to download the trial version and give it a whirl.  I’ll report back on findings.

The following article gives a ‘fans’ perspective of why QlikTech is awesome.

ajo BI Industry, MicroStrategy Gartner, QlikTech