Qlik, the data and analytics solution provider, has shared a host of new updates at its flagship event, Qlik Connect 2024 in Orlando, Florida, with CEO Mike Capone emphasizing that quality data is essential for successful business.
Qlik’s takeaway mesSage was clear: “Data is the foundation. Your data quality makes or breaks your future ability to harness value from AI and analytics,” said Capone in the opening keynote. “A bad insight because the data feeding your analytics was wrong can really be painful and can really damage your business.”
No matter how revolutionary, AI technology could be bad for business with a poor data feed, as Capone explained: “We have the ability to spit out garage at a breathtaking rate. Data is the foundation. Your data quality makes or breaks your future ability to harness value from AI and analytics. […] It demands we put in the time and we deploy the right technology. […] We’re here to turn data into outcomes.”
While critiquing other vendor strategies for demanding sole ownership of customer data, or else pushing their users to only their cloud platforms, Capone promised “we do it with you, not to you”, continuing Qlik’s ethos of integration, and announced two new solutions to provide more capabilities and flexibility to Qlik’s now 40,000 customers.
Two new products
Available next month across Qlik’s customer base, Qlik Talend Cloud looks to deliver no-code to pro-code AI-augmented data integration capabilities, and Qlik Answers promises to offer AI-generated answers to a wide range of business case prompts, with full explainability from unstructured data.
Qlik Talend Cloud
The launch of Qlik Talend Cloud, a new data integration solution built on Qlik Cloud infrastructure, follows Qlik’s acquisition of Talend back in May last year.
Talend Cloud solution seeks to enable faster, quality-assured data curation and a data marketplace to enhance the delivery of domain-specific data across the organization. Moreover, data engineering tools with no-code to pro-code options will assist users in assessing data health and creating trusted AI-ready data for complex AI projects. The solution also incorporates SaaS data connectivity to enhance its handling of diverse data sources.
Qlik Answers? Scroll no further
Next, Qlik has announced the July release of Qlik Answers, which uses business knowledge bases, driven by GenAI, to answer large numbers of prompts from employees. The reaction on the ground was strong, with the news quickly rousing the packed-out keynote hall into an excitable chatter.
An insight advisor with GenAI-driven data analysis, powered by Anthropic Claude in Amazon Bedrock, it allows users to ask questions such as “Why are so many orders predicted to be late?” or “Can you go through thousands of call logs and data in order to uncover details about the business?” to uncover new insights into operations and create some prescriptive recommendations.
The Qlik team touts it will enable team members to share real-time happenings and create proactive predictions, as well as the ability to drill down into the root causes of challenges both within organizations and their wider supply chains. The solution hopes to free up the time of data scientists for the more complex business challenges.
The launches come with a new waffle menu, for quick access to user data hubs and enhanced AI-driven and self-service visual reporting capabilities, for attractive and high-functioning dashboards in Qlik Cloud Analytics.
Expanded Qlik Connect-ions: Snowflake AWS, UNFCCC and more
In tandem with the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, happening simultaneously in San Fransisco, Qlik has announced an expanded partnership with Snowflake, extending its capabilities with the Snowflake Data Cloud through the adoption of Snowflake Cortex AI.
Optimizing SAP data management with Snowflake, Qlik’s integration looks to enhance data ingestion and analytics for users in a shift from batch processing to interactive, AI-driven applications. Utilizing Cortex AI, including vectoring, embedding, and completions within the RAG architecture with Qlik’s analytics, the collaboration is set to support data cleansing and allow modified data to be written back into SAP.
Named Qlik’s partner of the year, AWS and Qlik have also expanded their collaboration, with targeted investments and combined technologies to simplify user journeys to enterprise AI. A set of four strategic initiatives between the two vendors will seek to drive AI app development, enhance SAP data utilization for both SAP and non-SAP data sources, enable greater data compliance across additional AWS regional regulatory requirements, and accelerate responsible and reliable AI technology adoption.
An expanded five-year collaboration with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was also announced, aiming to accelerate the UNFCCC’s ability to aid climate change negotiations.
With data-informed actions through Qlik’s data integration, analytics, and AI solutions, the UNFCCC will use large global datasets and public dashboards to assist countries in its climate policies and strategies. Qlik will also work with UNFCCC to enhance data literacy and continuous AI integration opportunities.
In an aside with ERP Today, Joaquim Barris, senior data scientist at the UNFCCC, explained how vital good data is in global climate negotiations, with often the most powerful stories able to push through deals and funding. He said: “You are not buying into the resolution, you are buying the story, and it works because the data is there, so the story is there.
“It’s not just about reducing a lot of things – that’s the problem it’s too complex – but explaining that this is going to affect everybody, and for these stories, when there is data behind, it’s easy.”
From Van Oord and Vanguard
Other customer highlights included supporting the Marine contractor, Van Oord, in creating a publicly accessible analytics dashboard to help highlight the coastlines and communities at risk from rising sea levels.
Elsewhere, investment management company Vanguard has been able to use Qlik to support the creation of a customer experience digital twin, as well as a cyber resiliency program to transfer data to contingency sites, over six lines of business, running over 11bn transactions per week with low 3-8 second latency, and with zero incidents of data loss.
Glen Wilkins, senior CTO architect at Vanguard said: “Now our enterprise strategy at Vanguard would be considered ambidextrous in nature. […] Qlik Replicate helps make our data available in our operational data stores and our analytics data lake to ensure a generative AI-powered customer experience.”
With stories of climate action success to customer experience wins, Qlik’s users were quick to highlight the benefits in the making from the analytics platform. The key component to all these stories? – good data has led the way.
