Posted on Wed, Jan 25, 2012
QlikPower has welcomed the two new immigration initiatives aimed at facilitating migrant entrepreneurs to create jobs in Ireland, in return for permission to live in the State.
''This is potentially an excellent opportunity for us to attract investment for our software development inintiatives in Ireland, and could provide a much needed boost for the industry as a whole'' said Noel Shannon - CEO of QlikPower and Commence International.
QlikPower are currently developing the Q Series of Business Intelligence applications which are focused on providing rapid deployment of prebuilt BI solutions for particular target markets throughout the world. Q 200 is focused on Sage implemenetations, Q Vision is for Microsoft Dynamics customers and Q Retail is for RMS installations.
The Immigrant Investor Programme and the Start-Up Entrepreneur Programme will be formally launched by the Irish Minister for Justice Alan Shatter in March 2012.
The first programme will require between €400,000 and €2m of an investment by applicants, depending on the level and duration of financial commitment.
The second programme aims to foster new enterprises for which the applicant will have to have financial backing of not less than €70,000.
Approved participants and their immediate family will be allowed enter the State on multi-entry visas and remain here for two years. The visas will be renewable.
Applications for both programmes will be considered by an Evaluation Committee comprised of relevant State Agencies and Government Departments.
Posted on Wed, Jan 18, 2012
Sometimes Small and even some Medium sized businesses are afraid to implement Business Intelligence solutions due to ignorance, fear of cost or complexity, lack of knowledge or an appreciation of what the benefits of a BI solution might be.
In general terms if you feel that you know everything about how your business works both internally and externally with your customers then you do not need Business Intelligence, but if you feel that you could reduce costs and also increase sales by understanding more about yourbusiness then you will benefit from BI.
Business intelligence solutions can pull data from multiple operational systems (finance, sales, supply chain management, etc.), integrate it, analyze it and present it in easily digestible form as graphs, charts and dials on screen-based "dashboards."
BI answers questions such as: Which are my best customers? Which are my most profitable products or services? Which are my most efficient locations? How much will it cost to open a new territory? Where am I wasting money?
"It's about being able to make smarter business decisions and gain insights into what drives the business: where the costs are, where the costs are leaking, where the opportunities are -- real tactical issues that make a bottom-line difference in how you run your business,"
A study commissioned last year by QlikTech from IT analyst firm IDC concluded that the average payback period for a QlikView implementation was an impressively short 198 days. The average return on investment (ROI) reported across all QlikView implementations was 186 percent, and the ROI benefits included an average 16 percent increase in revenue and 20 percent reduction in operating costs.
QlikPower is a BI specialist that has developed a series of BI Analytic Dashboards that are ready to go and can be deployed with your ERP system in a matter of hours. They call this the Q Series of BI solutions and the first product to be available is Q 200 for sage 200 Users.
Q 200 will deliver a much faster ROI because we have deleoped the product around our existing customers stated problems and we know that they have the same issues as most other Sage 200 installations'' said Noel Shannon - Director of QlikPower.
Posted on Thu, Jan 12, 2012
The recent announcement that Accenture is opening an Analytics Centre in Dublin is a really welcome piece of good news and highlights the importance that this worldwide organisation is attaching to the whole area of Predictive Analytics as a means of improving business performance in the future.
Customer insight, risk analytics, and business intelligence are key components of this initiative. In QlikPower we use the latest version of QlikView to deliver these capabilities to a wide array of customers and we are offering an introduction to this technology to anyone who is interested in furthering their knowledge of this technology.
You can download the latest version of QlikView for FREE from our website by registering your name. 
The Accenture Analytics Innovation Centre is the first of its kind to be located in Ireland. Its sole purpose is to develop sophisticated techniques in compliance-related analytics, with the aim of solving the complex business challenges facing Accenture’s clients today. The anticipated growth of this centre is ambitious: there are plans to rapidly expand its predictive analytics capabilities to encompass an exhaustive portfolio of industries, areas and geographies. It will also become a global showcase for Accenture’s resources, to clients from around the world.
About QlikTech
QlikTech (NASDAQ: QLIK) is a leader in Business Discovery -- user-driven Business Intelligence (BI). QlikTech’s powerful, accessible Business Discovery solution bridges the gap between traditional business intelligence solutions and standalone office productivity applications. Its QlikView Business Discovery platform enables intuitive user-driven analysis that can be implemented in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all. The in-memory associative search technology it pioneered allows users to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined path of questions. QlikView Business Discovery works with existing BI applications and adds new capabilities: insight for everyone, zero-wait analysis, mobility, an app–like model, remixability and reassembly, and a social and collaborative experience. Headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, QlikTech has offices around the world serving more than 21,000 customers in over 100 countries.
Posted on Tue, Dec 13, 2011
QlikPower have announced an inititiative to develop a series of Business Intelligence applications to address the needs of organisations who want to implement Business Intelligence solutions rapidly while avoiding the need to use extensive IT resources.
Typically these customers are frustrated with existing ERP, CRM and legacy systems where they know that there is lots of data, both current and historical which is highly relevant to the decisions they have to make on a daily basis. The means to extraxt this data is usually time consuming and resource intensive. They often resort to copying from various systems into spreadsheets which are then worked on to get the information aggregated in the right format.
They are also aware that selectiing a BI solution which is tailored to their needs can be a very lengthy process to identify a solution that will work for them and may involve significant investment and IT resources.
The QSeries of Business Intelligence Applications are aimed at satisfying these unique needs, they combine the comprehensive, powerful analytics of QlikView BI with the ease-of-use of consumer applications.
These solutions, known as the QSERIES, will comprise the following:
- Q200 - for Sage 200 Users
- QNav - for Microsoft Dynamics Nav customers
- QRetail - for Wholesalers and Retail customers
- QForce - for SalesForce CRM customers
- QProject - for Project Management
Development work began several months ago and the first in the QSeries, Q200 is being launched in January 2012. Q200 is aimed at Sage 200 customers who are frustrated with getting the relevant information out of their ERP systems. More detail on Q200 will be announced in our next Blog.
QlikPower are offering a free trial for up to 90 days so their cutomers can rapidly evaluate the benefits to be delivered from Q200. For more details on the QSeries - please click here
www.qlikpower.com
Posted on Tue, Nov 22, 2011
QlikPower is a leading Business Intelligence company serving the UK and Irish marketplace, delivering BI solutions based on the QlikView platform.
Having implemented Commence CRM from they now have a complete customer management solution which has dramatically improved the entire Marketing, Sales and Customer Support operations within QlikPower
Working in partnership with DB Computing – a leading Sage reseller - they have recently developed specific solutions for mid-market enterprises using Sage accounting software. These out-of-the-box solutions provide a parameterized package that delivers immediate ROI and avoids expensive consultancy services to achieve the same result.
‟We had a lot of legacy data which was inherited from the previous owners of QlikPower and it was all over the place‟‟ said Paddy Moore – COO of QlikPower, ‟so we needed to get it into one place and also find out where all the relevant email history was and relate it to those customers and prospect accounts. We also needed to address all the other areas like Marketing and Customer Support where we believed we could achieve significant productivity gains through the use of the latest technology‟
Commence Corporation's "best in class" CRM software offers a comprehensive suite of applications for business contact management, sales and sales force automation, marketing, campaign management, lead management, project management, customer support and analytics. The solution is delivered on demand as a managed service hosted over the Internet.
‟A selection process identified that many of the CRM packages just did'nt stack up or were too expensive when we added all the modules that we required. Commence had recently announced their new operations in the UK and since we felt that Support would be important we decided to evaluate their solution. We were immediately impressed with the intuitive interface and the broad range of functionality available to our users from one dashboard and we really liked the fact that their cloud solution was hosted in the UK, from a support point of view‟
Commence CRM is used every day by all sales and support staff to manage and improve communications and relationship management at QlikPower.
Posted on Tue, Nov 15, 2011
QlikView 11, introduces social decision-making on its to help business users collaborate to make more insightful decisions. With this release, QlikTech expands its vision to include all the ways people make decisions every day – with relevant data, on location, and with teams.
QlikTech, (NASDAQ: QLIK) a leader in Business Discovery—user-driven Business Intelligence (BI), today announced QlikView 11, introducing social decision-making on its self-service BI platform to help business users collaborate to make more insightful decisions. With this release, QlikTech expands its vision to include all the ways people make decisions every day – with relevant data, on location, and with teams.
Just as QlikTech disrupted the BI industry by empowering all business users with interactive data analysis instead of static reports, the company is now leading the next transformation to collaborative decision-making that leverages the power of the collective intelligence of a group, organization or department to accelerate better decisions with greater alignment and transparency.
QlikView 11 also marks the next generation of associative search pioneered by QlikView with the introduction of comparative analysis. Comparative analysis extends the QlikView associative experience to enable interactive comparison of user-defined groupings. Other key benefits of the release include making application development easier and faster, and enhancing QlikView’s manageability and security capabilities for large enterprises.
Customers are realizing the value and ease of QlikView upgrades as illustrated in the recently-announced BI Survey 10, conducted by the Business Application Research Center (BARC). With the largest number of participants in this year’s BI Survey, BARC analysts report “remarkably, all those who specified they used [QlikView] stated that they used Version 10, the current version.”
“Our vision for QlikView 11 builds on the fact that decisions aren’t made in isolation, but through social exchanges driven by real-time debate, dialog, and shared insight,” says Anthony Deighton, CTO and senior Vice President, Products at QlikTech. “QlikView 11’s social business discovery approach allows workgroups and teams to collaborate and make decisions faster by collectively exploring data, anywhere, anytime, on any device. Business users are further empowered with new collaborative and mobile capabilities, and IT managers will appreciate the unified management functionality that allows them to keep control and governance at the core while pushing usage out to the edges of the organization.”
Social Business Discovery Accelerates Decision Making through Collaboration
QlikView 11 puts the social and collaborative experience front and center. With social business discovery, workgroups and teams can collaborate by collectively exploring data in real time, as well as jointly creating analysis to quickly answer business questions and arrive at informed decisions.
Now QlikView users can invite others – even those who do not have a license – to participate in live, interactive, shared sessions. All participants in a collaborative session interact with the same analytic app.
- Co-Create with Collaborative Workspaces – QlikView users can invite others – even those who do not have a license – to participate in live, interactive, shared sessions. All participants in a collaborative session interact with the same analytic app and can see others’ interactions live. From their tablet or desktop or laptop computer, users can share selections and test scenarios together to better uncover insights, solve problems, and make decisions.
- Provide In-Context Commentary – Users can now post and respond to notes right in the context of any QlikView app. During the creation of an app, this could include communication about changes to the app’s design, or new or easier ways to view data. Throughout the usage of an app it could include questions, answers, and insights about the data. Notes and comments can be added to charts, graphics, and visualizations, and are accessible as threaded discussions.
Comparative Analysis Drives Deeper Insight
With QlikView users are not limited to predefined paths they must follow, or questions they must formulate ahead of time. They ask what they need to ask, and explore up, down, and sideways and now even side-by-side.
Business users can now create multiple selection states in a QlikView app; they can create graphs, tables, or sheets that are based on different selections, then compare multiple selections of data inside one document, one chart, or one object, to spot trends, outliers, or differences. This makes it easier to gain new insights into patterns of use, opportunities and threats.
Comparative analysis is used for contrasting multiple data sets like market basket comparisons in a retail setting or stock performance analysis in financial services. For instance, to compare the performance of two or more groupings of products, users simply select multiple products for each group and QlikView automatically visually contrasts their performance—across regions, time periods, or any other measure.
Mobile Users Gain Insight “On Location”
QlikView 11 on Mobile delivers the complete business discovery experience – including interactive analysis, rich visualization, associative search, and the ability to share apps, data and decision trails. QlikView takes full advantage of the immersive, interactive potential of touchscreen tablets like the Apple iPad, Android tablets, and BlackBerry Playbook. QlikView 11 makes optimal use of small touch screens such as the Apple iPhone or Android phones by presenting a single chart or graph at a time. By leveraging advanced HTML5 browser technology, QlikView delivers a touch-driven interface that makes BI as easy and compelling to use as consumer apps, while IT retains centralized security and manageability.
Enhanced Enterprise Capabilities for Control at the Core
With QlikView 11, IT can serve the business like never before – all while assuring strict data security, quality, and governance. Customer-driven enhancements include extending support for very large deployments with improved scalability, ease of administration and security management. Automatic load balancing ensures maximum performance even with thousands of users while extensive APIs broaden integration with business applications and system management software.
Rapid App Building Marks the End of the End User
In just a fraction of the time it takes with typical BI solutions, QlikView 11 lets users create apps through a simple process that instantly delivers relevant analysis, reports, and dashboards critical to decision-making and operations. New functionality improves team development through integration with third-party source controls like Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and additional layout and analysis capabilities enhance application design.
With QlikView 11, users have point and click app building capabilities to embed UI elements on the fly – no keystrokes needed. A QlikView app can be even more quickly and easily enhanced and extended to meet changing business needs. New data sources and related listboxes, visualizations and images can be integrated with the app auto-calibrating to reflect the additions. QlikView 11 includes connection wizards and out-of-box connectors to SAP, Informatica, and Salesforce.com.
Availability
QlikView 11 can be viewed in action at http://demo11.qlikview.com. QlikView 11 Personal Edition will be available for free download by the end of year at www.qlikview.com/download.
Posted on Wed, Oct 12, 2011
QlikTech, today announced that in a comprehensive survey of companies using business intelligence software products, QlikView ranked first among the BI Giants peer group in customer loyalty, performance satisfaction (least complaints), bought for features, inclination to purchase more licenses, overall competitiveness, and product quality. The BI Survey 10, conducted by the Business Application Research Center (BARC), is the world’s largest independent survey of Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) users.
With the largest number of participants in this year’s survey, the latest edition of the BI Survey has again confirmed that among the BI Giants peer group QlikView customers were the most loyal. Customer loyalty remains one of the most coveted categories among vendors, according to Barney Finucane, lead author at BARC.
“No one knows more about how a product performs in the real world than the customers already using it,” said Finucane. “To achieve top customer loyalty scores for three straight years says a lot about both users’ experience with the product and company, and the future health of the business. In my view, this is indicative of QlikTech’s focus on building a high quality, innovative, feature-rich product.”
In continuing to outpace larger rivals such as SAP (Business Objects), Oracle (Hyperion) and IBM (Cognos), QlikView’s #1 ratings also include:
- Intent to Buy More Licenses – QlikView had the highest number of customers intending to buy more licenses, solidifying its reputation in the industry as a vendor with high satisfaction and rapid growth. QlikView customers are over 40% more inclined to expand their use of QlikView than the weighted average of all major BI product suites.
- Performance Satisfaction – Fast query performance emerged as a criterion most closely linked to project success. Query performance was rated highest by QlikView customers who reported the least complaints of any vendor regarding query performance-related issues.
- Product Features – QlikView is the most likely to have been bought for features, as opposed to price or strategic reasons. This is a strong indicator that the QlikView Business Discovery platform is bringing a whole new level of analysis, insight, and value to business users.
- Mobile Use – QlikView users are 48% more likely than users of any other database product studied to use mobile BI, or to plan to use mobile BI within 12 months. As the only true Business Discovery solution on mobile, QlikView offers the consumer-like experience users are seeking, while providing IT the security and manageability it requires.
“In a few short years, QlikTech has converted itself from a regional player to one of the major players in the market, and are able to keep their users happy as they grow,” continued Finucane. “It’s remarkable that all those who specified they used [QlikView] stated that they used Version 10, the current version.”
“It is an incredible accomplishment to outperform a host of other BI products across a broad spectrum of key performance indicators,” said Lars Björk, QlikTech’s chief executive officer. “The results of The BI Survey 10 reflect QlikTech’s ongoing commitment to providing the highest quality Business Discovery solution and services to help people, teams, and entire organizations run smarter.”
The BI Survey 10 – now in its tenth year – generated more than 3,000 responses analyzing 26 different BI products from April through July 2011. The purpose of this online study is to uncover the motivation behind mid-market and enterprises selecting BI products, examine how they use them, and to what level business benefits are achieved.
About QlikTech
QlikTech (NASDAQ: QLIK) is a leader in Business Discovery -- user-driven Business Intelligence (BI). QlikTech’s powerful, accessible Business Discovery solution bridges the gap between traditional business intelligence solutions and standalone office productivity applications. Its QlikView Business Discovery platform enables intuitive user-driven analysis that can be implemented in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all. The in-memory associative search technology it pioneered allows users to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined path of questions. QlikView Business Discovery works with existing BI applications and adds new capabilities: insight for everyone, zero-wait analysis, mobility, an app–like model, remixability and reassembly, and a social and collaborative experience. Headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, QlikTech has offices around the world serving more than 21,000 customers in over 100 countries.
About Business Application Research Center (BARC)
Business Application Research Center (BARC) is a leading independent software industry analyst delivering information to more than 1000 customers each year. For more than ten years, BARC has specialized in core research areas including Data Management and Business Intelligence as well as Enterprise Content Management.
BARC publishes the largest end-user survey on Business Intelligence products – The BI Survey – and the most comprehensive collection of in-depth BI product evaluations and market analysis – The BI Verdict (formerly known as The OLAP Report).
More than 30 highly-qualified professionals deliver 100% unbiased and well-founded knowledge about the software market with software evaluations, conferences, market research and consulting. BARC has offices in the UK and Germany, and partners worldwide.
QlikTech and QlikView are trademarks or registered trademarks of QlikTech or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Other company names, product names and company logos mentioned herein are the trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Posted on Tue, Aug 30, 2011
Sometime between the invention of Facebook and the Apple iPad, people’s expectations of Business Intelligence software changed. Consuming, exploring, and sharing information has been redefined by the search bar, status box, and multitouch screen. Three key trends have led to a worldwide explosion in home computing over the last five years, and now companies are rapidly adopting them.
Consumer Apps. Apps such as Google’s and Apple’s invite users to open a window, start clicking, and become instantly productive. Business users increasingly demand the same experience at work and are frustrated when confronted with cumbersome and complex systems.
Social Networks. A growing majority of workers now use Facebook, Twitter, andLinkedIn at home to share news, crowdsource ideas, and trade files. Social networking is becoming more prevalent in organizations too, as it helps to flatten them by decentralizing decision-making and enabling collaboration among previously siloed people and groups.
Mobility. First smartphones and now tablets (led by the iPad) offer engaging, intuitive, and powerful capabilities that finally deliver on the promise of business-on-the-go.
Where is IT in all of this? Stuck tending to ERP, CRM, BI, and other monolithic systems (as well as facing the task of integrating all this new technology securely into the enterprise). While users don’t expect enterprise applications to be as easy to use as Google, they have been trained to think that asking a question is as simple as entering a couple of keywords and instantly receiving an answer—without having to know where or how the underlying data is stored. All that matters is that their questions are answered fast so that they can act decisively. End users have lost the innocence of their previously low expectations.
This White Paper draws a distinction between traditional BI and Business Discovery. The content discusses how placing tools for innovation in the hands of users extends the power of IT to every corner of the enterprise. And how Business Discovery takes investment in traditional BI and turns it into a dynamic tool for empowering users to help make businesses better. The content was written by CITO Research and sponsored by QlikView and can be used on the website, in content syndication on third party sites, as “nurturing touches” in lead generation campaigns, and for most other marketing and sales uses.
Posted on Thu, Aug 25, 2011
The emergence of Business Discovery is a response to users’ mounting frustrations and unmet needs, according to a recent report by CITO Research. It’s a new kind of productivity software putting users in control of exploring and exploiting their own data, allowing IT to focus on core processes rather than attending to their every need.
Click here to download the full Whitepaper:
Business Discovery bridges the gap between reporting-focused BI solutions and standalone applications like Excel. It enables users at every level of the organization to find tailored insights addressing their individual needs and deadlines. In essence, Business Discovery transforms everyone into a highly informed business analyst.
In many ways, Business Discovery aims to fulfill the original promise of BI, which
proved to be impossible due to the limits of the architecture, forcing IT to shoulder the burden. But Business Discovery improves upon reporting-focused BI because there is no predefined path to follow and no questions to formulate ahead of time. Users ask what they need to ask, and they explore—aggregating up, down, and sideways—rather than simply drilling down.
Using lightweight tools that marry connectors to the underlying databases with fluid interfaces reminiscent of apps, Business Discovery systems drive down the cost and complexity of aggregating disparate data sources, which can then be combined and correlated in different ways to discover waste or opportunities.
For example, a question as simple and as random as whether there’s a correlation between the size of a product shipment and the number of units placed on backorder may require data from three separate databases. IT knows all too well that combining those three would take six months and cost upwards of $250,000. So the answer to most questions is usually, “Forget it; it’s not worth it.”
But what if it cost $5,000 and a day’s worth of work? Users would have an answer the next day, with enough money in the budget left over to commission another dozen or more projects just like it. If only one results in significant savings, the scattershot approach will have been worth it. By driving down the opportunity costs for IT and users alike to ask questions and make better-informed decisions, users are in a better position to capture market share, drive revenue growth, and cut costs because they no longer have to wait for the data they need.
The evolution from a reporting-focused BI paradigm to Business Discovery has profound implications for IT, replacing its traditional delivery role with a support and enablement one. Rather than building applications day in and day out, they dispense tools and training to users while refocusing on larger issues such as data governance, security, and the underlying enterprise systems.
Posted on Tue, Aug 02, 2011
We may be a QlikView partner, but we take an interest in Tableau.
Their Data Visualisation capabilities are some of the best in the business.
Tableau 6.1 has just been announced, and it is interesting to see that Apple iPad optimisation is included. It looks good, and knowing Tableau it will work well.
QlikView has a fully-enabled iPad and mobile capability, and it has been out for some time. Check our blog post from April for proof!
When you develop a QlikView App, you develop it once, it works in a Browser, on mobile, everywhere. There is no additional software, licencing or anything else, it just works!
I think the real message here is that Architecture matters. Qlikview and Tableau have truly flexible architectures under the hood. They can change their products more readily. Traditional BI 'Stack' Vendors are struggling to make their architectures respond to the pace of change, weighed down by the myriad of acquired products in their platforms.
Technology, Businesses and Customers are moving faster than a 3 to 4 year release cycle. But today, why can I still only see a video, or images of their mobile capabilities, and not live apps that I can explore on my iPad?
Today, iPad's for business are hot, even hotter for BI, they are the ideal form factor for mobile BI. Next year who knows what will happen? Qlikview's architecture ensures your BI can go wherever you need it to go.
To see Qlikview apps on your iPad, try the following Qlikview Sales Management or TV Finder demos.