Nice Read #1: Gartner’s Magic Quadrants 2009/2010 and Qlikview

Gilles from www.quickqlearqool.nl has written a nice review of the new Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2010:

Gartners Magic Quadrant 2009

Gartners Magic Quadrant 2010

The most interesting fact in Gartner’s analysis is that QlikTech/QlikView is not a visionary anymore!
Some quotes from Gilles article:

THERE ARE NO VISIONAIRIES ANYMORE!! Even Qlikview isn’t a visionary anymore.

… the explanation for Qlikview not being part of the visionaries anymore is quite understandable. Other parties are copying the unique selling points of Qlikview. Microsoft introduces PowerPivot, SAP created an easy entry proposition with Business Objects Explorer, and Cognos came with Express, all focusing at business users, some of them with in-memory techniques, enabling business users to what Gartner calls “Surf and Safe”. That “proves” that Qlikview is on the right track with the big vendors copying Qlikview’s approach.

One major issue that Gartner is pointing out in its analysis is that Qlikview could have had its momentum. Qlikview is/has been very successful with in-memory technology and 64-bit computing enabling scalability of Qlikviews model.

To summarize what Gartner says about Qlikview’s strengths, we can be very short: It is easier, simpler, cheaper, faster, quicker to deploy and is more feature rich than the competition.

To conclude this post: Qlikview is still going strong and has a very good product (and marketing), but Qlikview needs to show some vision on the short and medium term. Vision is not about incrementally adding new functionality, but more about how to service those large enterprise deployments. Qlikview has to do some serious work on an enterprise wide semantic data layer and better tools to manage large deployments.

My thoughts:

• I totally agree with Gilles’ analysis!
• In my opinion QlikTech really has to think about how to move QlikView forward into the next decade. In memory analysis is not a unique selling proposition anymore, even if QlikTech has some years more experiences with in-memory-analysis this will not be enough to prolongate the success story of the last years.
• Furthermore I’d really like to point out that QlikTech has to think about their strategy when publishing new versions. Even if I really like QlikView (as you can see on this blog) it is really a problem if new versions are published (QlikView 9, QlikView 9 SR1) which are really buggy and are not at all useable in professional environments!!!

Possibly related posts:

1. QlikNews: QlikView im Time-Magazine
   Die Veröffentlichung dieses Artikels ist zwar schon eine Weile her, zur Sicherheit poste ich es aber nochmals für jene, die diesen Artikel noch nicht kennen: Kurzauszug einiger Aussagen: “Your brain is associative,” says Lars Bjork,...