QlikView, local vendor of a Swedish developed business intelligence (BI) tool, believes it has the right technology to take on traditional BI vendors in a space that is becoming increasingly important to corporations.
International research firm Gartner says BI has become CIOs` number two priority in 2005 after having trailed in tenth position a year ago.
"Because of the new emphasis on BI, the worldwide BI tools software market grew by 7.7% in new licence revenue in 2004, based on preliminary estimates of the composite market," Gartner says.
It divides the BI market into two segments: enterprise BI suites (EBIS) and BI platforms. EBIS revenue grew in 2004 by 5.6% to $1.070 billion and BI platforms showed a revenue growth of 10.2% to $978.7 billion to a total growth rate of 7.8% for total revenue of $2.049 billion.
Gartner ranks the top three BI vendors worldwide as Business Objects, SAS Institute and Cognos. It expects the overall BI market to grow at a compound annual rate of 7.4% until 2009 when the total market should be worth about $2.9 billion.
XHead = Away from OLAP
QlikView plans to make its mark in the local and international markets through the use of, what it believes to be, a different type of software that uses Associative Query Language technology to allow instant, in-memory manipulation and analysis of massive datasets on low-cost hardware.
"The primary advantage of this is that it does not require the expensive and time-consuming implementation of OLAP [online analytical processing] and cube technologies that were previously necessary, making business intelligence vastly more affordable, accessible and easier to deploy," says Davide Hanan, MD of QlikView South Africa.
He says QlikView technology is based on a gamble taken a few years ago that computers would become faster, and that memory would become cheaper. "This has happened in spades, and with the introduction of 64-bit operating systems, the trend is accelerating."
According to QlikView, its tools work in a fundamentally different way to traditional OLAP-type tools. It builds and maintains a non-relational, associative and space-efficient database that resides in memory on a server or a desktop, which can continue to be analysed even when not connected to data sources.
It says the software is suited to combining data from various sources (multiple databases, text files, Excel, etc), which is particularly useful to organisations that keep additional information (such as budgets) outside the standard enterprise resource planning systems. This allows companies to continue to leverage their legacy systems while having the freedom to adopt updated tools and technologies.
Customers in SA include the Omnia Group, the Oceana Group, Sun International, Pernod Ricard, The Lion Match Company and Sara Lee. Global QlikView customers include AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Top Flite, 3M and The Campbell Soup Company.
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