QlikView South Africa has accelerated its rapid growth in the country, recording a 10-fold increase in customers in five years. This month the company passed the 1000-customer milestone by signing the South African subsidiary of global group Saint-Gobain.
"Fast, flexible and visual"
Alex de Sousa, supply chain and business systems director at Saint-Gobain South Africa, says the subsidiary was investigating BI products and came upon QlikView as a global BI leader. "We analysed it and found it to be flexible and powerful. It allows you to interrogate business systems from any angle, as opposed to the inflexible reports that one normally has to deal with."
In parallel and independently, St Gobain's group CIO did an investigation into QlikView. Based on the two assessments, the solution was chosen as the group's preferred solution for the construction products division.
"It is extremely fast, as it works in-memory, as well as flexible and adaptive. It's user-friendly and visual, presenting information in different, modern, graphical views," De Sousa concludes.
He says St Gobain intends to roll out QlikView in every area of the business, with the help of QlikView partner KPI Management Solutions.
'Business discovery' leads
QlikView SA MD Davide Hanan says the company's success is due to the user-driven brand of business intelligence it pioneered (termed 'business discovery').
"Business discovery tools are implemented enterprise-wide or by organisational units to give business answers to business questions, rather than predefined reports designed by IT. It has come to define modern BI, and QlikView has continued to lead this growth direction, which has come to dominate BI."
User control
Business discovery gives business users control over their information in keeping with the general trend of the consumerisation of business applications and tools.
"Technology that succeeds addresses end-user needs as its reason for being," says Hanan. "QlikView is easy to use, offers compelling visualisations of business trends and allows rapid development of BI models for every area of the business - by business users."
IT governance
At the same time, QlikTech - the company that developed QlikView - has gone to great lengths to ensure the IT department's governance requirements are met.
"QlikView offers superior integration with any source and the ability to support and manage user access and security on multiple platforms, locations and databases," says Hanan.
The old way
Contrasted with this balanced approach, traditional BI tools place outsized importance on IT's dictates, restricting the user experience. "This blunts the solution's effectiveness. Users do not think in predefined query terms," says Hanan.
According to Gartner, inflexible BI tools result in low user engagement. As a result, 30% of users who should use BI do so, whereas QlikView's flexibility encourages far better user engagement.
Tech visionary
To underpin its user-centric vision, QlikTech patented an in-memory associative search technology early on in its corporate history. This technology finds data associations rather than rely on cumbersome, skills-intensive querying of hierarchically-structured data, as done by SQL systems.
It shows up reasons for trends in the data and allows system interrogation in any direction. "Traditional systems can show you the problems, but not why it has become a problem," says Hanan. "And since all the data is in-memory, the response is immediate."
Assisting this wave of change, ever more efficient data compression and ubiquitous broadband have allowed the adaptation of QlikView to mobile platforms. "Thus QlikTech has pioneered BI software overhaul on at least three catalytic levels," says Hanan.
"Years ahead"
The latest corroboration of the tool's clear technological leadership came in October this year, when a Business Application Research Center (BARC) survey ranked QlikView first among its BI peers in visual analysis, agility, innovation and shortest project length.
"Our continued strong technology ratings shows that we have not just kept up with advances, we are years ahead of the field in our understanding of true user-centric BI," says Hanan. "As a result, QlikView offers very low total cost of ownership, with a low technical skills requirement, as well as greater speed and agility in arriving at business answers. We think that advantage gives us momentum to keep building on."
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