QlikTech Opens New Doors to Analytics

QlikTech revealed a string of new product and service offerings this week in Philadelphia at Qonnections 2006, the company's first U.S. user and partner summit. In addition to a new partner program, the announcements represent a new focus by QlikTech to allow partners and third-party vendors easier access to its product offerings. Headlining the announcements was QlikView for Communities, a deployment model that allows organizations to extend analysis from QlikView, the company's flagship business intelligence application, to third party vendors, VARs, or customers. As an example, Anthony Deighton, vice president of marketing at QlikTech, says companies could share purchase and inventory information with channel partners to reduce waste in the supply chain, or by sharing customer service KPIs, a service provider could improve customer satisfaction through its resellers. "This allows an organization's external community of users easy access to its BI solution," Deighton says. "This sort of a solution can add a ton of value to a PRM application." Given the size and multiple skill sets of its targeted audience, QlikView is based on an AJAX Web interface for ease of use, allowing users to point and click their way through data. To share QlikViews amongst partners, the company unveiled QlikCommunity, a Web site that allows partners and customers to discuss best practices, receive advice from experts, and to post product enhancements. The company revealed QlikView Publisher, a tool to assist customers in managing enterprise deployments of QlikView. QlikView Publisher facilitates large scale deployments of QlikView by streamlining the distribution process, enhancing security, and automating updates for QlikView applications. "As a company grows, Publisher will grow the company's QlikView application with it by securely distributing and integrating QlikView with other applications," Deighton says. As part of a new corporate roadmap, QlikTech announced Qonnect, a new global partner program designed to provide QlikTech partners with the opportunity to improve their existing product offerings. It enables consulting, platform, and software companies to engage QlikTech and its customers with offerings that complement QlikTech products via a set of programs and services to help QlikTech resellers develop and promote their solutions. The announcements are representative of the increasing scope of BI platforms to include more users and access more data sources. Originally meant for senior executives and analysts, there is a strong emphasis on extending these solutions throughout the organization to other employees, says Kurt Schlegel, research director at Gartner. "BI platforms will increasingly rely on data from a broader array of applications and data sources, as opposed to just databases." Related articles: Gartner Releases Its BI Magic Quadrant You Got Your PRM in My CRM

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