QlikView SA User Conference 2012 bulges at the seams

Already buoyed by excellent financial results and customer growth, business intelligence (BI) vendor QlikView wowed an extraordinary turnout of 630 delegates at its 2012 SA User Conference with the social and mobile features in QlikView 11, the new version of its software.

In a welcoming address to customers, partners, corporate luminaries and media, QlikView SA MD Davide Hanan introduced the delegates to Business Discovery, the next stage in BI that aims to change the way people use BI and work with data to make better decisions and catapult their businesses forward.

Follow-up presentations by QlikView SA staffers highlighted the key themes within QlikView 11 that are extending and popularising QlikView's vision of self-service BI.

* Social Business Discovery - Just as user-driven BI disrupted that industry, next-generation collaborative decision-making will disrupt it by leveraging the collective intelligence of a group, organisation or department to accelerate better, more aligned and transparent decisions.
* Mobile Business Discovery - Business users are further empowered with new mobile capabilities in QlikView 11 that leverage immersive touch capabilities while accommodating smaller screen sizes.
* QlikView 11 also marks the next generation of associative search pioneered by QlikView with the introduction of comparative analysis, which enables interactive comparison of user-defined groupings.

* IT managers will appreciate the tool's unified management functionality, which allows control and governance at the core while pushing usage out to the edges of the organisation.

* Other key benefits of the release include easier application development and enhanced manageability and security capabilities for large enterprises.

Sean Taylor, partner at Insight Consulting, a leading QlikView implementation and services firm, says the “wow factor” was clearly evident at the event. “QlikView seems able to foretell people's wants and needs from BI. Just watching the audience's response to the various existing and forward-looking features made it clear they were blown away.”

Henrik Been, QlikTech vice-president of product strategy, was responsible for two such wow moments with visualisation features that had the audience gasping and applauding with appreciation.

To round out the day, presentations by leading customers, including Pepsico, the Bombela Operating Company (which built and operates the Gautrain), Santam and Standard Bank highlighted the multiple settings in which QlikView can deliver value.

* Standard Bank described the role QlikView played in its drive to change the face of banking.
* Bombela Operating Company realised value from QlikView in the unusual setting of an engineering environment, while defying the perception that data models must have permanent use.
* Santam's implementation proved QlikView's suitability in large installations.
* Pepsico demonstrated the concept of actionable insight versus run-of-the-mill analytics.

But perhaps the most startling success story of all - other than possibly that of your own company - is the case of a CIO in the retail industry who downloaded the Personal Edition of QlikView (for free) to build an app that saved his employer R1 million - within four days.

Citing this as an example of what success stories are still waiting to be told, Hanan issued a challenge to delegates to search for the 'hidden millions' in their companies in pursuit of similar successes and launched the Business Discovery Competition.

The first three people who make or save their company R1 million with QlikView will each get R50 000!

QlikView 11 can be viewed in action at http://demo11.qlikview.com.