Qlik Unveils Latest Version of Qlik Sense

Qlik, a provider of visual analytics, yesterday introduced Qlik Sense June 2017, the newest release of its application for self-service business intelligence (BI) and visual analytics.

Built on a fully integrated, cloud-ready platform, and powered by the patented QIX Associative Indexing Engine, Qlik Sense combines enterprise readiness and governance with intuitive visualization and exploration, advanced analytics, and self-service data preparation capabilities.

"Qlik pioneered the category for user-driven, governed self-service BI. With Qlik Sense, we continue to expand the market by creating a scalable, secure, and cloud-ready platform that organizations can consider the centerpiece of their enterprise-wide BI deployment," said Anthony Deighton, Qlik's chief technology officer and senior vice president of products, in a statement. "Our platform approach allows us to address a breadth of use cases with more depth than other offerings. The openness of the underlying platform expands opportunities for custom analytics apps, embedded BI, and developer innovation leveraging new technologies like artificial intelligence and natural language generation."

Qlik has also added several new client options for use with Qlik Sense Enterprise and Qlik Sense Cloud. Qlik Sense Mobile is a new, native app for Apple iOS, which supports the full associative model when offline, with the QIX engine running locally on the device, and integrates with EMM products such as AirWatch, MobileIron, and Blackberry. In addition, Qlik Sense Desktop is now offered as a supported client when used in Qlik Sense Enterprise environments. Qlik is also including Qlik Connectors in Qlik Sense Cloud Business for seamless access to REST sources, Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter, with enhanced support for tabular sources such as CSVs and Excel files and connectivity and automated refresh capabilities. Additional connectivity is rapidly being added, including SQL Server via ODBC for on-premises data, followed by cloud-based file storage services such as Dropbox and Box.com.

Qlik Sense now includes several new visualization types, including a Box Plot, Distribution Chart, and Histogram. Users will also be able to apply custom coloring to particular data values within master dimensions. Search history now makes it easier to go back to previous analyses.

Qlik Sense also offers improved smart data preparation capabilities for business users to load, transform, and enrich their data without the need for complex scripting. Visual data profiling helps users understand their data as they load it into Qlik Sense, including auto-generated visual representations of the data through histograms and other visualizations. Data binning enables users to create data bins or groups of numeric data. Table concatenation allows users to concatenate tables even if they do not have the same fields and field names. Now users can bring tables from two companies together even if they do not store data the same way.

Finally, Qlik Connectors now provides connectivity to hundreds of data sources, including file-based sources such as Excel and XML; enterprise sources such as Oracle, SAP, and ODBC databases; web-based sources such as Salesforce.com; and big data sources including Teradata, Cloudera, and others. In addition, connectors to Salesforce.com and SAP HANA have been enhanced and Qlik Web Connectors have grown to include more than 40 popular web applications and services such as Bit.ly, Google Search Console, Google AdWords, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and more.

Qlik's big data capabilities have been enhanced to include On Demand App Generation templates built directly into Qlik Sense, enabling users to navigate big data sources using associative search to discover areas for detailed analysis.

Through its open APIs, Qlik now offers integration with natural language generation and processing, advanced predictive analytics, and augmented intelligence. New advanced predictive analytics integration allows for direct data exchange between the QIX engine and third-party calculation engines. Qlik has released integrations using this interface for R and Python.

With the newest edition to the Qlik portfolio, Qlik GeoAnalytics, both Qlik Sense and QlikView users can add maps to their apps with automatic geo-data lookup and then overlay them with different visualizations. Users can drill down into maps that contain millions of points, but also use Qlik GeoAnalytics cloud-based service to analyze geo-data in combination with non-geo data for determining potential store locations or calculating supply chain delivery times. Several geospatial and mapping improvements have been made, such as supporting shapes, drill down, multilayer maps, and increased data density.

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