Data Integration
Qlik Ahead: Our Direction for 2023
Innovation Driven by Market Feedback
In just a couple of weeks, I will be in Singapore for our first in-person Sales Kick Off since 2020, and I can’t wait to join colleagues as we prepare our organization for the year ahead – first in the APAC region, quickly followed by Europe and the Americas.
This year’s theme is “Qlik Ahead”, and it is well fitting as we all look forward to a new year that is filled with the promise of great customer interactions (including in-person at QlikWorld!) and product innovation aligned to customer success.
Our product team is passionate about building a best-in-class innovation pipeline that is fueled by market research and feedback from our customers, partners and customer-facing teams. What our customers like and don’t like, how they use our products, ideas and recommendations they have for new features and improvements – all of it helps inform our product portfolio strategy.
And its feedback that works in a loop. As ideas get prioritized then executed, and go live and get adopted, we monitor the way our customers use our products, giving us a complete picture that is fed back into the system for further innovation and enhancements.
So, where does that lead for 2023? Our product investments and roadmap are focused on three core areas: Data Integration, Analytics, and Foundational Services.
Data Integration
It’s clear that our customers are ready to make cloud central to their enterprise data strategies with Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (eiPaaS). They want to worry less and less about the infrastructure – but do it securely. Last year we introduced Qlik Cloud Data Integration, a set of SaaS services designed for data engineers deploying enterprise integration and transformation initiatives. This year we will be introducing new capabilities to enhance this eiPaaS offering, with a particular focus on the following areas:
Transformation – When it comes to data movement and transformation, Qlik’s approach has been aligned with the shift to ELT: extract the data using change data capture (if available) to move the data in real-time, intelligently load the data to optimize costs, and push down the transformation to leverage the power of cloud data warehouses in a style that is much more agile. Our plan for this year is to extend our transformation capabilities for any data in the warehouse, not just data that we’ve moved as part of our ingestion process. This will also help our client-managed Qlik Replicate customers to leverage existing data pipelines and take advantage of the powerful fit-for-purpose and automated data transformation capabilities.
Expanded Cloud Connectivity – Historically, Qlik has focused on replicating data from on-premises transactional systems and databases with our best-in-class change data capture (CDC) technology. This year we are significantly expanding support for SaaS applications and data sources on top of that very strong foundation, enabling our customers to connect to the widest variety of sources both on-prem and in the cloud. In sum, if you have used our on-premises solutions in the past, you will get the same, simple user experience that allows you to get complex on-prem data from mainframes, SAP, or you will be able to get cloud data from ServiceNow, Salesforce, Survey Monkey, Google Analytics, and much more. The advantage for our customers is the ability to go to one vendor to integrate all of their data.
While we are excited to round out our eiPaaS offering this year, our investment in our on-premises solutions will also continue. This includes planned enhancements to Qlik Replicate, Qlik Compose and more. We’re also focused on even more interoperability between our on-premises and eiPaaS offerings to provide the flexibility necessary to meet all your integration challenges.
Analytics
We’re on the continued path to make it easier for our customers to move their analytics to the cloud and take advantage of all the great Qlik analytics capabilities in Qlik Cloud. This includes continuing to augment our visualization library and strengthening our advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities and our support for security, scalability and performance to address increasingly large enterprise requirements. Here are key areas we will be focused on:
Visualizations and advanced authoring – Today Qlik offers wide variety of visualizations and this year, we will be rounding out our portfolio of deep-dive capabilities for users to “fine tune” their dashboards without the need for third party extensions. And this is for the benefit of all users, not just the technical users. Lots to look forward to in this area, in the meantime please be sure to check out our “24 days of visualization” from last month if you missed it. We will also continue to provide enhancements for simplified authoring, our intuitive creation interface, as well as introduce more advanced authoring capabilities to address more complex needs.
Enterprise reporting – We know our customers continue to care about distributing their analytics with pixel perfect reporting. Our work this year will focus on providing additional collaboration options with more touch points to integrate with the Microsoft Office suite specifically the ability to author and reports in Excel which extends our recent release of Microsoft PowerPoint support last month.
AutoML and augmented analytics – Last year marked a huge step forward in empowering business users with predictive analytics with the release of Qlik AutoML integrated right into the Qlik Cloud experience. This year will deliver enhancements for Qlik AutoML as well as our other augmented analytics capabilities including key drivers and improvements for our powerful .
Integration – We will be extending our multi-tenant creation, hydration/management capabilities by providing additional APIs and automation capabilities for managing users, contents and tenants at scale. We also understand our customers will have requirements to integrate our technology into their ecosystem: to support this, we will continue to provide more integration points to allow them to automate and embed our technology.
Finally, as we have seen additional requirements from our large enterprise customers, we will continue to address needs around scale, security, management and governance. And customers for our on-prem solutions can look forward to seeing enhancements for Qlik Sense Client Managed, including visualization enhancements like more fine-grained chart options and updated KPI/table/pivot tables, and administrator updates. All the while we continue to provide them with ways to make it easier to move to the cloud, so they can take advantage of the latest innovations in Qlik Cloud.
Foundational Services
Our third area of investment is what we call “Foundational Services,” which are solutions that work for the benefit of both data integration and analytics users. These solutions are designed to facilitate connectivity and automation of data pipelines and enable the journey to the cloud. Our focus will be on the following:
Catalog & Lineage – Our catalog and lineage capabilities in Qlik Cloud provide customers with a full understanding of the data flowing through their analytics data pipelines – from source through transformation to use. This year we will be taking this critical function to the next level with new intelligent capabilities such as auto field classification. And coming very soon: a business glossary that will provide data and analytic users with a single, centralized glossary of business terms and their definitions.
Application Automation & Orchestration – We’ve received great feedback on our automation and orchestration capabilities, which enable users to quickly assemble automated flows and connect to market leading SaaS applications. This year our focus will be on extending enterprise support, with priority on access and permission control, new monitoring, and Qlik Cloud governance.
Hub Experience – For users that take advantage of our Qlik Cloud hub, this year we will be making it even easier for them to act faster, and create their own experience aligned to their specific company and individual needs.
In-Product Support – Finally, this year our Qlik Cloud users can look forward to leveraging more onboarding, enablement and engagement resources right in the product.
Your feedback drives our action, and we truly appreciate the passion our customers and partners bring to the process, whether it’s through our Ideation Program, surveys, events or through your Qlik customer success and account management teams.
I hope to see many of you at QlikWorld in Las Vegas on April 17-20. In the meantime, keep talking to us and submitting your ideas here, and stay up to date on everything product innovation at Qlik at .