Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

There’s recently been an important debate taking place on LinkedIn around the topic of relational databases, joins and how that impacts a user’s experience with analytics.

Ever find yourself in your closet searching for an article of clothing or trying to squeeze one more hangers on the rack? I took the better part of the afternoon on Saturday to clean out my closet. It made me realize a few key things. I am a pack rat and this clean up exercise took way longer than I thought. I anticipated the exercise taking 30-45 minutes tops. How hard could it be? What I discovered 3 hours later is I keep too many unnecessary items.

A few years ago, Qlik ran a campaign called the Whole Story. The related video is still posted (fun fact: It was filmed in Qlik’s office near San Francisco). Our message was that you don’t know the whole story in your data if you a.) aren’t able to look at all the data while b.) understanding all the relationships between data.

I started my Qlik journey as a customer and there was a reason why I fall in love with the technology; its one-of-a-kind Associative technology that helped me ask the unknown questions by surfacing the hidden associations and connections between data values.

Today’s always a big day in the analytics world – the release of the annual Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence. Qlik continues its streak of being positioned in the leader’s quadrant, with today marking our ninth consecutive year. That is consistency in vision and execution a customer can trust. So how did we get here?

To begin, following the success of the Dashboard Bundle released back in November, we are now launching the Visualization Bundle, which includes seven of the most popular visualization extensions from our open source community. These additional chart types dramatically improve how our customers can visualize data. More to come throughout the year with new and exciting advancements via our bundled extension strategy.

Two weeks ago, we ran the annual market trends webinar. As I’m dealing with the aftermath, or “postmortem”, I’m still overwhelmed by the response to it. It clearly struck a chord (or nerve), as displayed by record attendance numbers, and the sheer interaction on and offline. There were far too many questions – over 300 – to cover off in a blog.

According to the Smith School of Business, 41% of business leaders reported that they rely too much on intuition (also known as the infamous "gut feel") and not enough on data.

Back in 1972 the late, great Lou Reed released “Perfect Day”, a slow, dreamy ballad capturing a couple’s perfect day in the park. The song makes me think how strong relationships can make every day perfect. Strong relationships are built on trust.

Qlik is at the forefront of bringing augmented intelligence even further into analytics, helping business users scale their ability to explore and surface key insights from all their data. As we expand the role and use of analytics through our customer organizations, we know that making it easier for users to interact with data is essential to both increased adoption and higher data value.