Traditional Business Intelligence tools in South Africa under threat from new technology

QlikView South Africa, provider of industry-changing business analysis software, has announced that it has been appointed a `QlikView Business Centre`. This is the highest category of QlikView partner, with South Africa being one of the few in the world.

This announcement marks the start of a campaign in South Africa to challenge traditional business intelligence tools head on. QlikView is a new generation of business intelligence software that uses Associative Query Language (AQL) 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.

"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," explains Davide Hanan, managing director of QlikView South Africa.

"Traditional business intelligence tools were born in the 80`s and developed on the basis that processors where slow and memory was expensive. This is why OLAP typically requires you to pre-aggregate data and pre-define hierarchies. This is not needed with QlikView and the immediate benefit is that it is a lot easier to implement and use. You also have a lot more flexibility when analysing data, making it accessible to more people at more levels in a company" says Hanan.

QlikView South Africa is committed to the concept of `democratising information`, putting business analysis tools into the hands of all the people that need it, from the CEO to the warehouse manager. "We have achieved a much better user penetration with QlikView than with any other tool. It is quite interesting that the first users of QlikView in any implementation are the executive team and then it filters all the way down the organisation" says Hanan.

QlikView works in a fundamentally different way to traditional OLAP-type tools. It builds and maintains a non-relational, associative and highly 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 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 ERP systems. This allows companies to continue to leverage their legacy systems whilst having the freedom to adopt updated tools and technologies.

A further advantage of QlikView is that it is not limited to standard BI functionality: it may also be used for performance management, scorecard applications and in fact any data analytics application.

"Although this is a new technology, our experience is that once we present QlikView to companies using their own data, we have a 98% success rate in converting prospects into delighted customers," says Hanan. "The introduction of the 64-bit technology has lifted the cap on the amount of data we could analyse in memory and has opened up a whole new market for us. We will soon be analysing hundreds of millions of lines in a data model. The writing is on the wall for OLAP based business intelligence tools."

Current customers in South Africa include the Omnia Group, the Oceana Group, Sun International, Pernod Ricard, The Lion Match Company and Sara Lee. Globally QlikView customers include AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Top Flite, 3M, and The Campbell Soup Company.