The second NYBI Meetup took place in a spacious board room of 1633 Broadway. The meeting kicked off with an exploration of QlikTech's in-memory analytics platform called QlikView with Scott Taylor and Nik Boman. QlikView is seeing success in the financial sector in NY and we wanted to know what made QlikView tick, what made it great, and how the "wisdom" of the NYBI crowd could make it even better. The PPT presentation of QlikView is available from the NYBIMeetup.org's File download section here.
From my recollections and sparse notes
QlikView is a visualization and analysis tool.
QlikView allows a Super User to correlate data sets from various data sources (local or remote) and to store a highly compressed (loaded data is 15% on avg of original data size) snapshot of the relational data map into memory. Coupled with a file structure that permits O(1) access to data and linear, O(n) traversal of data sets, this in-memory storage essentially serves as a Virtual Cube of correlated data for the user to play with. A very rich interface that is available in client, or embedded form, permits almost serendipitous creation of dashboards with parametric drilling, intelligent filtering - the works. Controls adjust themselves and each other instantaneously - the Regular User interacts with the charts through intuitive click and drag motions. The assumption is that the data loaded into QlikView is already of high quality/integrity.
When asked "Who is typically the first person among client prospects to go 'Oooh! Aaaah!", response from the QlikTech guys was "Deprived end-users that have to go to IT for cube build-outs that may take months to generate 'ooh and aah'. IT that sanctions ownership supervises, scrutinizes, realizes that QlikView is a boon to them."Challenges to QlikTech and points of Discussion
- Is not the goal of BI, actionable outputs? Hypothetically, with QlikView I found my 3 bad products and I want to commit the pricing strategy - I have to write something out/communicate - If I want to do that, I have to interact with other modules (beyond BI modules) to make actions, how do you make the action happen? Should the products not better integrate into popular desktop productivity apps? For example, how can my interaction with these dashboard be affected if I could key off of an email address to view a Sales Report for that person in a sidebar within Outlook? (reference to Xobni). As a platform, QlikView has potential for such rich integration - the exercise is left for IT or QlikTech's affiliates.
- What kind of API should BI platforms expose? What do we really wish to do on the Desktop vs on the Server?
- What about community contributions? A community of business partners and affiliates who align to complete a vertical is not necessarily the same things as, let's say, a community of developers writing and contributing extensions to enhance a product's core (i.e. Firefox community and extensions development). Is there value for BI vendors to stretch beyond affiliate networks in order to establish an open participation and innovation culture? With respect to NYBI Meetup, what would something like that look like?
Truths and Trends
Following above rhetoric, in turn, should not NYBI Meetup be about actionable outputs? After all, a Community has to deliver value to those it serves. One baby step forward was to conclude the meetup with "Can we derive any Truths or Trends about BI from topics covered in discussion?" Here is what we came up with:
- Truth: People are looking for a better way to solve the same problems. Core Issues of BI are still prevalent. Recent advances in BI tech now provide better ways to deal with these Issues. QlikView is a note-worthy example of such innovation in the space.
- In-memory processing is Trend.
- RIA (AJAX) adoption and movement to web interfaces is a Trend.
- Truth: Data Quality is a Foundation for BI
- Truth: BI Tools need to consume WebServices as a datasource
- Truth: Killer App = functionality + price
We are always looking for interesting presentations. To sign up, please visit http://nybimeetup.org.
