“We Show Every Day that We Can Do It” – Lars Bjork

Last Friday, QlikTech CEO and President Lars Björk was interviewed on Fox Business News following QlikTech’s Q3 earnings announcement. Here’s a link to the video. I’ve also pulled out some of the highlights from Lars’ comments. My favorite one is his answer to the question about his confidence in continuing to compete with software companies that are much bigger than we are: “Of course we can. We show every day that we do it.”

 

Fox Business: What is the secret of your success?

 

Lars Björk: I think the secret is a piece of software that we developed. We put a great team together. We target the common challenge of businesses. How can you make better decisions with all the facts that you have, drive up and drive down expenses? More important now than ever.

 

Fox Business: Companies are dealing with a lot of pressures. What’s your elevator pitch to get clients to make that outlay for your software?

 

Lars Björk: It’s focusing on what their specific problem is, whatever that industry is. Is it gaining insight into something? Is it gaining  time? Or is it reducing cost? It’s being very, very specific. And most importantly, being able to deliver in a short of time.

 

Fox Business: You are competing with a lot of big boys like Oracle and SAP. What’s your biggest challenge? You only have 2% share of the market. What do you see as the landscape as you grow?

 

Lars Björk: I think we have a great opportunity. What we have ahead of us is more of an execution game. I think what we benefit from is we sell something that is self-service in our space. We sell something that is quick time to value. And we’ve shown over the last 10 years that we can outgrow competition. So we are catching up to them.

 

Fox Business: Do you have any concerns about trying to compete with other companies that have bigger budgets?

 

Lars Björk: Not at all. We show every day that we do it.

 

Fox Business: You have some big customers. As you talk to executives in these companies, what is your sense of the outlook? What is your sense of the level of optimism right now?

 

Lars Björk: I think the sense that you see in news that there is a big problem out there isn’t what I hear from customers. Whether you are in Europe or the U.S, I think the sentiment is still that, yes, “I want to run my business efficiently.” But it’s an optimistic view. I’ve just traveled in Europe. And what you see on the news in the U.S. isn’t represented in what you see in general in European business life.

 

Fox Business: A lot of people have been very bullish on the technology industry. A lot of people have been bullish on it. What’s your outlook going forward? What makes the growth prospects of your industry so attractive?

 

Lars Björk: I think we are sitting on top of one of the biggest challenges in business life today. Everyone knows that the future competitiveness with your business lies in managing your data, your information, and making better decisions than competition. I don’t think you can see an end to that problem.

 

Enjoy!

Gartner Says New Relationships Will Change Business Intelligence and Analytics

Analysts to Discuss the Future of BI at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011, January 31- February 1, in London and May 2-4, in Los Angeles

Egham, UK, January 6, 2011—   Business intelligence (BI) and analytics leaders need to embrace four trends that are set to challenge traditional assumptions about these technology areas, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The market for BI and analytics is undergoing gradual evolution,” said Neil Chandler, research director at Gartner. “By 2014, the metamorphosis of BI from IT-owned and report-centric will be virtually complete for a large number of organizations. These organizations will change what types of BI and analytics they use. They will change how they procure them and where they procure them from, and they will modify how information feeds decision making. BI and analytics leaders should embrace the technology, market and management trends that will transform this field within a few years.”

As part of its Predicts 2011 body of research, Gartner has identified four key BI predictions to help organizations plan for 2011 and beyond:

1- By 2013, 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices.

Current adoption rates and the broad availability of current-generation devices, paired with BI vendors’ development and marketing efforts, are promising to quickly generate a strong wave of mobile BI users. At first, mobile BI will largely consist of existing reports and dashboards ported to the mobile device but by 2012, Gartner predicts that organizations and vendors will develop mobile analytic applications for specific tasks or domains. Mobile BI will significantly expand the population of BI users to include a more mainstream audience and this opportunity will attract significant investment.

Gartner advises organizations to work with the marketing department and product management to create customer-facing mobile BI applications, and with the supply chain group for supplier applications. They should recognize that users will want to use mobile devices to access corporate BI data. They also need to ensure that the current BI infrastructure supports these demands while promoting the use of tablets to improve the BI experience of the mobile workforce.

2- By 2014, 30 percent of analytic applications will use in-memory functions to add scale and computational speed. By 2014, 30 percent of analytic applications will use proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities.

The growing use of sophisticated analytic functions will accelerate the growth of the performance management and analytic application market. Packaged applications will incorporate data and text mining, forecasting and regression, optimization, scoring and simulations using complex business rules and data modeling. As the speed of response and data volumes increase, organizations will look for columnar data repositories and in-memory online analytical processing (OLAP) that is faster and easier to architect.

Organizations should evaluate trade-offs between build and buy approaches to meet a diverse range of use cases and consider making integration a top selection criteria rather than creating a new information silo.

3- By 2014, 40 percent of spending on business analytics will go to system integrators, not software vendors.

Traditionally, organizations bought products almost exclusively from software companies and system integrators then helped the buyer to implement them. However, the growth of user-driven initiatives, external information sources and the integration of unstructured content make this traditional approach increasingly risky and potentially uncompetitive. Buyers can now evaluate solutions – for example marketing campaign effectiveness in financial services – as total packages and select a lead provider, often a service provider to deliver it.

Gartner recommends that organizations allow business users to participate in any decision to purchase a software-only or services/software solution. They need to broaden their evaluations to include service providers, and evaluate them based on industry expertise and best practice in addition to functions and architecture. Finally, they need to consider how solutions will tie into existing investments.

4- By 2013, 15 percent of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments.

Organizations are starting to piece together collaboration technology, social software and BI to create collaborative decision making environments. During the next 12 to 18 months, these efforts will continue to grow as organizations start to more proactively manage, capture and optimize decision processes and outcomes to improve performance beyond the decision inputs such as BI. Collaborative decision environments will drive investment in new BI and analytic applications, particularly those that link with collaboration and social networking functions. Gartner has already noticed that a number of vendors are beginning to address this challenge.

Gartner counsels organizations to find a senior executive to sponsor cultural change in support of fact-based, transparent decision making who understands the value of specific collaborative decision-making use cases to the organization. The value of collaborative decision making can then be demonstrated by focusing on departmental, line-of-business or process-specific decisions such as forecasting.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Predicts 2011: New Relationships Will Change BI and Analytics.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1478114.

About Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011
The Summit will provide Gartner’s latest insight on how to make BI in organizations meet the new needs of business after the recent economic shift. Business strategies, organizational structures and BI and performance management (PM) architectures are being ‘reborn’ to reflect changed priorities – helping organizations maximize the potential of these new opportunities by providing the insight that business leaders need.

For further information on the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011 taking place on January 31- February 1 in London, please visit europe.gartner.com/bi. Follow news from the event on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc and using #GartnerBI. Members of the media can register for this event by contacting Ben Tudor at ben.tudor@gartner.com.

My experience with Qlikview 11’s Event Driven execution

Hi guys this is my first blog  entry at cloudiview so i though i should share something very useful which i discover lately and its quite interesting if you are a Qlikoholic.

Introduction

Event Driven Execution (EDX) allows the running of QlikView batch jobs based on external events. The primary usage of EDX is to have an external scheduler or Extract,Transform, and Load (ETL) tool (for example, Informatica) run QlikView batch jobs as part of a larger batch process. There are also other use cases, forexample, triggering a QlikView batch when a file arrives and user-initiated batches. This document describes the requirements for each of these three use cases.

The example code (attached below as QMSEDX-v1.exe) and executable (attached below as QMSEDX_CommandLine_v1.exe) that is delivered together with this document uses the new EDX API, which means this document and the example code are useful both when using the EDX functionality for the first time and when migrating from previous versionsof the EDX API.

Use Cases

Using an External Scheduler or ETL Tool

Many large organizations have other batch requirements than just QlikView. Such organizations often use a standard tool to run all batch processes, so that the IT training costs are minimized and common operations (for example, logging and re-launching) are handled in one central place. In addition, QlikView batch processing is almost always reliant on new data being available and in many cases this data is created by other batch processes. An external scheduler or ETL tool can be used to prepare the data and then run the QlikView batch to load it.

Most scheduler and ETL tools are designed to run external batch programs via a command line interface. The reasons for this include:

• Batch processes are long-running, so starting aseparate process to handle them provides a simple way for the scheduler tomonitor the batch processes.
• The scheduler can be configured to run the batchusing a particular operating system account that provides the required securitycontext.
• If the batch process fails, the standard operatingsystem error handler can be used to pass this information back to the scheduleror ETL tool.

The main alternative to using a command line tool is using some sort of web services. Unfortunately,web calls cannot be used for long-running processes, since a timeout eventually occurs. A common solution to this problem is to start the process with a web request and then follow it up regularly with subsequent requests to find out if the original request has finished successfully or not.

File Arrival Detection

In many IT departments, the inter-system communication is not orchestrated by ETL or even Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools. Instead, files are pushed. For example, a non‑QlikView batch job that extracts data from a production database is typically owned by the IT team running the database, which means the team is responsible for creating and configuring the batch job and ensuring that it runs correctly.On the QlikView side, a program that checks if a file has arrived must be running, so that the file can be used in a subsequent QlikView batch.

In this scenario, simply starting the QlikView batch process should be enough. There is no need to follow its execution. The program is typically a Windows service as it runs all the time.

User-initiated Action

TheQlikView Automation API provides a number of functions that run QlikView batch scripts, for example,Document.Reload(). However, it is normally not a good idea to let users run batch jobs, since a QlikView batch job typically replaces the entire data set of an application used by many users.This means a single user can interfere with the work of all the others unless the QlikView batch is carefully configured. Because of this, the batch functionality is disabled in a QlikView Server deployment.

• The marketing department at a pharmaceutica lcompany has an organizational division between the analysts and the product managers. The analysts are in charge of loading a dozen external data sources of varying quality. Once the data relating to a particular product is ready, the running of a QlikView batch loads the data and publishes the application to the relevant product managers.
• A software company with thousands of employees wants each employee to have access to their sales data up to the last 30 minutes. The computer resources needed to support such data usage are massive. Since the salespeople only use the system once a week on average, it is decided to allow each user to run a QlikView batch to generate a QVW (for the user)whenever needed.

EDX in QlikView 11

In QlikView 11, EDX runs through the QlikView Management Service (QMS) API. This is a major change from QlikView 10, where EDX is realized by calls directly to a QlikView Distribution Service (QDS). The QMS API is a web service API that uses theSimple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Client applications make HTTP (web) requests to QMS on port 4799. The system is secured by NT LAN Manager (NTLM) as well as special protective measures to avoid certain types of hijacking attacks known as “time limited service key”. This combination of security means the client application must be written in .NET and therefore the provided example code is .NET projects/solutions developed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

The client application uses NTLM to authenticate a Windows account to QMS. QMS then checks which Windows groups the Windows account for the client application is member of to determine the function calls the user is allowed to make. Most of the QMS API requires membership in a local group called “QlikView Management API”, but to run EDX, a separate group, “QlikView EDX”, should be used. Both groups are local Windows groups on the server where QMS runs.

The client application makes calls to instruct QMS to start a task and in return receives an error code indicating success or failure, as well as an execution ID. The execution ID uniquely identifies the execution of the task as opposed to the task itself. The client application then periodically polls QMS to check the progress of the task execution. This poll request returns a data structure that contains, among other things, the execution status, start time, stop time (if already finished), and a list of new execution IDs. These subsequent execution IDs represent the execution of tasks that are triggered because the initial task has finished. The client application can then follow an entire set of inter-related tasks that together make up a full parallelized batch flow.

Lastly, the example code outputs log information and returns an error code to the operating system. The error code can be recovered in a standard way, for example, by using the %ERRORLEVEL% environment variable in a BAT file.

Changes Compared to Previous Versions

From a functionality perspective, the following has changed compared to using EDX in QlikView 10:

• Because communication is with QMS instead of QDS, a QDS cluster can be used to load balance EDX calls. If high availability is required for the batch environment, QMS is a single point of failure. Consider either virtualization of QMS or an active/passive system.
• The overall success or failure code of aQlikView batch can be returned. Previously, the status of the task could be fetched (that is, the definition of the batch job), but not the execution ofthe batch job.
• The execution of subsequent tasks can be followed.

Notes on Using the QMS API

Finally,some notes on using the QMS API in QlikView 11:

• The EDX password must not be null. Use an empty string, if no password is configured.
• The QDS ID is required in the function call that starts the EDX batch job. However, higher-level privileges than membership in “QlikView EDX” are required to get a QDS ID. The simple solution is to pass an empty GUID for the QDS ID, which means QMS will search for the task in all configured QDS instances. Almost all projects today only have one logical QDS configured, so this can be a useful solution.
• EDX can be used without a QlikView Publisher license. Simply pass the name of the QVW instead of a task name and the reloadschedule of the QVW will run.

This is a white paper i shared with you from Qliktech by arthur lee.

Following link has a sample code which might help you out on this.

http://community.qlikview.com/docs/DOC-2650

Gartner Research Report 2012: Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant

This report presents a snapshot of how vendors perform in a market segment with the goal of helping end users make better informed decisions about companies they may be looking to partner with, or whose services or products they may want to purchase.

According to Gartner, “In 2011, business users continued to exert significant influence over BI decisions, often choosing data discovery products in addition to/as alternatives to traditional BI tools. An avalanche of new use cases, content types and interaction models expands the scope for tomorrow’s BI platforms.”

The report goes on to say “Data discovery alternatives to enterprise BI platforms offer highly interactive and graphical user interfaces built on in-memory architectures to address business users’ unmet ease-of-use and rapid deployment needs. What began as a market buying trend in 2010 has only continued to expand.”

To view the Gartner Research Report 2012 just click here