Embracing Iceberg with Scalable, Open, Data Solutions for Customer Success

Headshot of blog author, Drew Clarke. He has short brown hair, wearing a blue button-up shirt, and is smiling in front of a plain gray background.

Drew Clarke

3 min read

Blog banner titled "Embracing Iceberg with Scalable, Open, Data Solutions for Customer Success" by author Drew Clarke, featuring a blue background with green motion blur graphics.

On behalf of Qlik, I’m excited to share some thoughts about our acquisition of Upsolver and how it opens up new possibilities for our customers, helping them achieve their goals in ways previously out of reach. First thing to say is how we’ve been deeply impressed by Ori and the Upsolver team’s relentless focus on innovation and solving customer’s problems. We met over a year ago when our respective teams were looking at ways our technology could jointly work together. This was a great first step in our journey.

AI is rapidly accelerating the creation and use of data, further amplifying the challenges organizations face in managing and utilizing it effectively. This surge in data makes it increasingly critical to adopt solutions that simplify and optimize the use of that data for analytical outcomes.

Central to this is Apache Iceberg, a transformative open table format designed to handle petabyte-scale datasets with high performance and reliability. By providing features like schema evolution, partitioning, and metadata management, Iceberg simplifies working with large datasets while ensuring scalability and governance.

By integrating Upsolver’s proven expertise in Iceberg optimization and streaming data with Qlik’s platform, we’re enabling our customers to unlock the full potential of data-intensive workloads such as AI and machine learning while maintaining control over costs and governance (plus more data portability AND reduce vendor lock in – but more on that later...

Rethinking Data Movement and Usage

In today’s world, data is being generated at an unprecedented scale. Businesses rely on it to make decisions, drive innovation, and create better experiences. However, AI’s exponential data generation is compounding these challenges, creating an urgent need for more efficient solutions. Yet, moving and managing this data has often been a complex and time-consuming process. Many organizations find themselves stuck in workflows where data must be staged, transformed, and loaded multiple times before it’s ready for analysis or machine learning. This traditional approach creates bottlenecks, leaving decision-makers working with outdated information.

We’ve seen how frustrating this can be for customers who need fresh, real-time data to fuel their AI and analytics initiatives. They don’t just want to access data - they want to act on it. That’s where Qlik’s acquisition of Upsolver helps.

Opening New Possibilities with Qlik and Upsolver

What excites me most about this acquisition is the opportunity it creates for our customers to work with data in more agile and scalable ways. Upsolver’s expertise in real-time data ingestion and adaptive optimization is a game-changer. It allows organizations to capture data as it’s generated—whether from streaming sources like Kafka or traditional systems like SAP - and make it instantly available for analytics or AI models.

Imagine a retailer adjusting inventory strategies in real time based on streaming data from point-of-sale systems, Or a healthcare provider refining patient care protocols with up-to-the-minute data.


Upsolver’s customers are doing this. One is ingesting 2M events per second (yes – per second), bringing in 1 petabyte of raw data per month, with no data engineers. This customer can then focus on the AI and ML use of that data for business outcomes. Another customer is ingesting over 120 billion events per day into 100s of iceberg tables which are then continuously optimized for the analysts and partners to access near real time behaviour data in near real time.

These are tangible outcomes enabled by Qlik’s end-to-end platform combined with Upsolver’s real-time capabilities.

Powering Open Architectures with No Vendor Lock-In

We have many enterprises customers coming to us looking for the flexibility to use the right tools for each job without added complexity, costs, or vendor lock-in. That’s why they prioritize open file and table formats like Iceberg, which enable interoperability, scalability, and cost savings while ensuring long-term data accessibility and governance.

Qlik with Upsolver offers an independent, end-to-end platform that allows users to ingest, store, process, transform, govern, and optimize their data in Iceberg-based lakehouses. With Qlik’s wide range of connectors, users can integrate data from diverse sources into a unified Iceberg lakehouse, avoiding duplication and ensuring flexibility. This approach empowers businesses to use the best tools for specific tasks while maintaining an optimized and scalable architecture.

Unlocking Productivity Gains and Cost Savings

Scaling analytics and AI initiatives often means grappling with high costs and strained resources. Traditional data warehouses can be powerful but quickly become rigid and expensive as data volumes grow. Qlik and Upsolver address this challenge by reducing storage costs and dramatically improving productivity. Organizations can save hundreds of engineering hours each month through automated table management and performance tuning, freeing teams to focus on innovation and strategy.

With Apache Iceberg as the foundation, this platform delivers the scalability, governance, and performance modern businesses need - all while optimizing the costs for the customer.

A Shared Vision for the Future of Data

At Qlik, we’ve always believed in the power of data to drive meaningful change. This acquisition reflects that belief, enabling our customers to do more with their data - whether scaling AI projects, optimizing operations, or uncovering new insights. By integrating Upsolver’s cutting-edge technology with our own, we’re building a platform that not only meets today’s challenges but anticipates tomorrow’s opportunities.

I’m incredibly excited about what this means for our customers and the possibilities it unlocks. Together with Upsolver, we’re helping organizations move beyond traditional data limitations into a future where data is more accessible, actionable, and impactful than ever before.

Welcome, Upsolver, to the Qlik family. We can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve for customers.

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