Qlik has been in the Gartner magic quadrant for 10 consecutive years. This remarkable achievement, once again emphasizes Qlik’s leading role in today’s Business Intelligence landscape.
Gartner Magic Quadrant
Modern analytics and business intelligence (ABI) platforms are characterized by easy-to-use functionalities that support a full analytic workflow — from data preparation to visual exploration and insight generation — with an emphasis on self-service and augmentation.
According to Gartner, augmented capabilities are becoming key differentiators for analytics and BI platforms, at a time when cloud ecosystems are also influencing selection decisions. This Magic Quadrant will help data and analytics leaders evolve their analytics and BI technology portfolios considering these changes.
Gartner Strategic Planning Assumptions
- By 2022, augmented analytics technology will be ubiquitous, but only 10% of analysts will use its full potential.
- By 2022, 40% of machine learning model development and scoring will be done in products that do not have machine learning as their primary goal.
- By 2023, 90% of the world’s top 500 companies will have converged analytics governance into broader data and analytics governance initiatives.
- By 2025, 80% of consumer or industrial products containing electronics will incorporate on-device analytics.
- By 2025, data stories will be the most widespread way of consuming analytics, and 75% of stories will be automatically generated using augmented analytics techniques.
The paragraphs above refer to Augmented intelligence and Qlik was the first one from the top vendors to embrace the term and do some decisive steps in that direction with its home-grown Insight Advisor. Later on, Qlik acquired the Insight Bot and just recently acquired RoxAI. In case Qlik manages to quickly integrate these two new tools into the Qlik platform and make them part of all their offerings (Windows, Linux, and Cloud), Qlik will be in a much superior position compared to its competitors from Microsoft and Tableau.
Power BI and Tableau
Power BI
Our teams work with Power BI and highly appreciate its capabilities. Thus, we are excited by the progress made through 2019 – Microsoft is investing heavily in development and adding tons of new features, most of which are based on customer demands. Based on our experience, this is the greatest strength of Power BI while we would put quite less weight in what Gartner describes as “Viral” spread – the smart pricing strategy of “start cheap” and “increase the price as you go”. Power BI is an excellent choice in lots of cases, especially when your company is heavily relying on other MS products for their daily operations. Power BI is currently an Azure-only tool as it comes to cloud deployments. There is an on-premises server, but it has great limitations compared to the full version. Тhis doesn’t seem to be subject to change as it is a vital part of Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy. However, this might turn into a significant risk of locking your company into a single cloud vendor to a point where migration will be prohibitively expensive.
Tableau
Tableau is clearly a leading platform with lots of momentum, as described by Gartner, great customer enthusiasm has also been seen by us on the field. Tableau gives developers and users the ability to create pixel-perfect eye-candy dashboards and this is what positions it very high on each demo or proof-of-concept project. Nevertheless, we have been hearing from our customers that there are quite some limitations when it comes to security and governance, especially considering the needs of large organizations. Tableau is also good at capitalizing its leading position with being less flexible in its pricing and contract negotiations. Gartner mentions all these cautions in their study. Speaking with our developers, we must be fair and give Tableau credit for their newly introduced features “Ask Data” and “Explain Data” – these are great augmented analytics features that provide easy and understandable insights.
Both Power BI and Tableau, however, are owned by prominent cloud vendors and are seen as their respective companies’ strategy to provide more services within the same platform. Thus, they come with all risks of relying too much on the same company and locking your data into a single platform. Therefore, considering the exponential growth of data volumes, the costs of switching to a different cloud vendor in the future will only increase.
Qlik
Compared to the previous two platforms, Qlik is unique with its multi-cloud strategy that allows users to have their deployments on-premises, on any cloud, irrespective of operating system (Windows or Linux) or on a combination of the above. Given who owns Power BI and Tableau, we can only see that Qlik will continue to be the only leading vendor that offers you hybrid or multi-cloud capabilities.
One of the other strengths of Qlik is the completeness of its platform capabilities – from raw data to analytics and insights. With Qlik’s strategic acquisitions of Podium Data, which is now Qlik Data Catalyst, they could offer their clients an enterprise data management, cataloging, and self-service preparation solution that simplifies and accelerates the delivery of accurate, actionable data in days, not months. Furthermore, Qlik also acquired Attunity and have recently integrated their software within the Qlik platform. Attunity allows for real-time data streaming, data warehouse automation, and managed data lake creation while it can deliver real-time, analytics-ready, and actionable data to any analytics environment, from Qlik to Tableau, Power BI, and many others.
One of the slightly overlooked strengths of Qlik, where they make significant investments, is their data literacy program. All of our clients agree that the main obstacle for modern companies to become data-driven is the ability of their employees to work with, analyze, and argue with data. No company can replace its people with computers, hence, in all successful organizations, there is no doubt that the role of humans is to work together with machines to drive performance.
One of the cautions mentioned by Gartner is the availability of 2 distinct products from Qlik that cover a similar use-case – the old QlikView tool and the modern Qlik Sense platform. Indeed, in our experience, Qlik has not offered a quick-enough transition strategy to its old clients and this is what brings a lot of additional costs, confusion, and dissatisfaction – clearly taken into account in Gartner’s ranking. Participating in Qlik conferences and getting all the partner messaging of the Qlik company, we can see that there is now an increased focus on fully covering the gaps between the two Qlik tools and we hope that in the next year we will already have a complete migration path so that this important source of customer dissatisfaction and confusions is fixed.
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Conclusion
Qlik has been in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for 10 consecutive years. This is remarkable, but for us, it emphasizes Qlik’s responsibility to listen to its customers and partners and quickly fix its shortcomings. They are indeed easily fixable – Qlik Sense only needs a few more key features to be on par with QlikView and to make all migrations possible. Yet, Qlik needs to push a bit harder on their development efforts to integrate the Insight Bot quickly, RoxAI, and NPrinting into the main platform together with Attunity and Qlik Data Catalyst. If Qlik doesn’t fix these issues in the next 6 months, we believe we are about to see one more magic quadrant with a big lead for Power BI and Tableau.
If you want to learn more about how Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik compare to each other, you can check our “Qlik vs Tableau vs Power BI” article.
