I recently got a chance to get a thorough company and product review from QlikTech who has been showing up more and more in helping organizations address their analytics needs across business. Not as well known in the industry historically but have been rapidly growing over the last five years as one of the fast growing BI vendors. QlikTech smartly has been avoiding the IT debate and sometimes debacle of discussion believing that one size fits all for BI in business. One of the key points of my investigation is the work they have done to integrate with SAP to help organizations find full value from their application investment. This requirement by many organizations has not been without debate on the right strategy and approach to integrating across a multitude of versions of SAP applications and data warehouse as I have recently pointed out.

QlikTech has take an approach to build a connector to SAP that is also SAP certified and can integrate into SAP R/3 4.6c or later but recently released integration into SAP BW operational data store (ODS) to bring transactional and cleansed atomic level detail together for consolidation and aggregation into QlikView. Now with support across the transactional and data warehouse environments of SAP in one platform they have joined an exclusive set of options that will make many organizations quite happy. Alternative approaches have been to make significant investments into data integration for building a consolidated data warehouse or support multiple BI environments including servers and metadata repositories. QlikTech also has help accelerate the readiness of their platform by providing pre-packaged data and analysis environments for SAP financial controlling and the sales and distribution modules which are typically key points for needed data from SAP.

Of course just getting to data in SAP is why QlikTech continues to grow as they integrated into a range of relational, flat files and other applications along with business needs addressing usability and integration to business processes. QlikTech has designed their product QlikView for business and the needs of analysts and management who have got fed up with the chaos of silos of spreadsheets and presentations. By enabling the ease of integration and aggregation of data into analytics they have addressed a range of issues that do not need IT involvement. I am not one to point out the importance of mobility as top priority and their recent announcement of their support for Apple iPhone. Being one of the few industry analysts pushing on the importance of supporting the reality of workforces need to interact with data on their devices, while others take the nod from IT who has little view on the daily operations of business.

Well, let’s see how QlikTech capitalizes on their SAP and Apple iPhone capabilities which appear to be on the right path and with customer adoption and product advancements. QlikTech could be the one to watch in 2009 for making BI become more readily used in business.

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Regards,

Mark Smith - CEO & EVP Research