Posted by info QlikPower on Mon, Oct 01, 2012 @ 11:03 AM
Train operator Eurotunnel, which runs Le Shuttle, is using business analytics applications built with QlikView, to analyse data from its SAP system, as reported from Computer Weekly
QlikView is being used by the sales team to help Eurotunnel Le Shuttle understand its customers better; their purchasing methods and patterns, geographical location and the impact of marketing campaigns.
It is used to assess business demand to plan capacity at the most effective times, including allocating additional shuttles to manage demand. QlikView is being used to measure business performance against budget and targets on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
The delivery of regular forecasts to the operational teams enables them to allocate resources, for example the provision of refreshments and staffing levels at the exclusive FlexiPlus lounge for customers requiring complete flexibility. The ability to link data easily has also improved fraud detection by linking data across millions of bookings to identify potential risks.
The business intelligence tool was selected over SAP Business Objects, due to cost and limitations of the SAP BI product, said Paul Lymath, strategic planning & analysis manager at Eurotunnel.
Lymath said: "We had strong resistance from IT, who wanted us to buy Business Objects. We were not opposed to SAP, but we were not going to compromised."
Lymath said he gave IT opportunities to show how BusinessObjects could be used, but the SAP BI tools would have been a lot more expensive and less flexible compared to QlikView.
"We wanted our analysts to build their own reports, rather than rely on IT," said Lymath.
"With Qlikview our analysts can build their own queries, rather than use a SAP consultant.
"My analysts create the applications. The whole ethos is about self-service."
The commercial team at Eurotunnel has 50 licences of QlikView. It is being used by eight analysts and 42 business users.
Lymath said QlikView offered Eurotunnel the flexibility to pull in data from multiple sources, including SAP BW, spreadsheets, the HR system and e-mail response data, stored as a flat file.
The deployment of QlikView started as a pilot project.
"We didn’t have buy-in from our IT department," said Lymath.
One of the barriers he faced was that IT wanted him to use a specific method to extract data from the SAP system using SAP BW with OLAP (online analytical processing) extraction, which did not work.
This would have allowed his team to extract only the data from the SAP system that had changed. Since the interface was not functioning, he had to scoop all data the SAP data on a daily basis instead using QVD, the QlikView file extractor. The data is extracted from SAP and loaded into QlikView.
Lymath said: “This does put a large load on SAP, but it was the only way we could extract the data.”
Once in QlikView, he said: “I can see sales from yesterday and compare to last year, and see, for instance, which tickets were sold, how they were bought, when are they are travelling, is it for the Olympics?”
Lymath and the team of analysts have built several applications providing analytics on the contact centre, business performance, sales, e-mail performance, Twitter and Facebook and coach sales.
Once SAP BI 7.0 is fully implemented at Eurotunnel Lymath plans to use the method IT prefers for extracting SAP data based on OLAP.
Posted by Paddy Moore on Wed, Jun 06, 2012 @ 04:21 PM
With the right presentation, your complex business data becomes meaningful and useful.
When we launched Q Series (with Q200 for Sage 200), we made a commitment to use the insights our customers provide to continuously improve the solution. Here is a preview of some of the new fetures we have built into Release 2...
Actual V Target
Let's face it, we all have targets to meet and beat.
Track performance against budgets and targets, with our new Summary Screen. Clear Charts, with auto highlighting of under / over performance.
Looks good on an iPad too!
Butterfly Charts
Butterfly charts (with auto highlighting) allow to analyze multiple KPIs at the same. Switch perspective with one click (Customer, Product, Sales Person etc.). Drill and zone in on the highlights and problem areas, all from one chart.
Instant Reports
You know the scenario. The meeting is about to start, you need some key figures to bring with you. Instant Reports allows you to build a custom report in seconds.
Simply pick the data and KPIs you want to see on the report, and it is instantly there. You can save reports for future use,
Switch between chart types with one click, to get the best view of your data.
Subscribe to our blog for future updates on QSeries releases.
Posted by Paddy Moore on Thu, May 31, 2012 @ 04:13 PM
The results of Dresners Advisory Services Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Survey 2012 make for sobering reading for IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle. These vendors are grouped together as Titans in the report. The Titans, in Greek Mythology were overthrown by the Olympians. The Olympians (appropriately for an Olympic year) were younger Gods. The war lasted 10 years.
The Wisdom of Crowds survey further confirms the changes happening in the Business Intelligence marketplace, and is consistent with the message from other analysts.
Not one of the 'Titan' vendors made it in to the 'Top 10' vendors for any of the seven categories. The Titans have the deepest pockets, and by far the largest support revenues flowing from their customers, but this does not translate in value and innovation for their customers.
The report also introduced a new grouping of 'High Growth' (Olympian?) vendors this year, of which QlikView is by far the largest.
These are established vendors, gowing at an explosive rate. QlikView improved its ratings in 4 of the categories this year, and is Top 10 in the majority of categories.
As if often the case with these reports, the conclusions are the most interesting part.
- Very large implementations of Business Intelligence solutions remain unchanged since 2010
- Still only a minority of users within most organizations have access to BI
- The proliferation of multiple BI tools continues to accelerate as line of business invests in solutions.
- Users of Emerging and High Growth segment products were more likely to report success than other segment.
Whats going on then?
Business Customers have lost faith in pouring in millions waiting for the 'Ultimate' solution from the Corporate Data Warehouse Group (or whatever title they are given). The fatal flaw in this approach, was that thse systems have become the hardest to change and adapt, when they should the most flexible.They are also have the highest cost of ownership, partly because they are hard and time consuming to change! While the Titans can spend billions adding more and more 'features' to their portfolios, they cannot fix the fatal time-to-change flaw at the heart of their offerings. Customers can however, seek to reposition the approach for higher business value. At the heart of many data warehouses, is high-quality, well structured data.
The pain points are trying to ensure 'all data' is in the corporate data warehouse, in a timely fashion, and can be exploited, explored and assembled in a flexible manner by people in the business.
Adapt your existing corporate Business Intelligence approaches to enable non-data warehouse, and external data to be 'mashed' up with the central corporate data in the Data Warehouse, and exploited using QlikView. Your return on investment will increase substantially and quickly. The Corporate Data Warehouse can slim down and focus on the most vital data, and QlikView can harness this data, integrate the other data of interest quickly and put it in the hands of your business customers with highly engaging applications.
Consumer-oriented business discovery, as pioneered by QlikView reaches and enables far more people, giving rapid, improved results and return on your investment.
I will return to the most exiting transition I have seen taking place in Business Intelligence in 20 years in future posts . In the meantime I might ask Donald Farmer, who speaks about this change in a compelling manner, how he feels about being an Olympian. Is photography an Olympic discipline yet?
Posted by Joe Maume on Thu, May 17, 2012 @ 10:15 AM
I read an interesting article the other day Enterprise resource planning functions differently on premises or in the cloud. This is one of the big questions in modern day business, as company leaders the world over are debating whether to switch over to the cloud or not. I thought this paragraph in the article was quite useful 
"One of the business solutions being bandied about quite a bit these days is the cloud. It may seem like a fad, but the computing power of remotely hosted software (or software as a service [Saas]) is undeniable especially when one considers the cost.
In fact, that is the primary decision that enterprises have to make when they're deciding how the architecture of their commercial software systems is going to function. The upside of a cloud-hosted suite of applications is that organizations won't have to spend nearly as much money on implementations, new equipment and tracking updates. Therefore, smaller and medium-sized businesses will often select this type of enterprise resource planning".
I agree completely with the author that cost is for most organisations the primary factor in deciding how the architecture of their commercial software systems is going to function. Businesses want good software but importantly they want it at a good price. This I, feel is what QlikPower excels at, providing a set of Business Intelligence applications that integrates with Sage, Microsoft Dynamics and other ERP systems. These apps offer great value and are of outstanding quality as they have been developed using QlikView, the world's fastest growing analytics and business intelligence technology.
We even have a blog post about what makes QlikView unique 
Posted by Joe Maume on Tue, May 15, 2012 @ 09:09 AM
QlikTech ranked third on Forbes annual list of America’s 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies. With LinkedIn and Apple occupying the top two spots. This is the first year that QlikTech has made the list, and to rank third on it is quite the achievement. With 12 month sales of $337 million and 12 month sales growth of 37% it's no surprise QlikTech finished so high. And with the third highest estimated earnings per share growth over the next three to five years, there is a strong possibility for QlikTech to make a return appearance on the list.
To compile the list, Forbes analysed more than 5,000 publicly traded technology companies with minimum revenue of $150 million and a minimum market value of $500 million. To be considered, companies had to show sales growth of at least 10 per cent for each of the past three fiscal years and over the latest 12 months. Additionally, companies had to have three-to-five-year estimated earnings-per-share growth rates greater than 10 per cent. The finalists were ranked based on their three-year average sales growth rates.
By finishing third on the list QlikTech shows it's ready to become a market leader in the relatively new sector of self service business intelligence. As you can see in the blog post last Friday Users Take Charge of BI, consumers are fed up with traditional BI solutions being outdated and too rigid in design. With QlikView offering instant answers to any question, mountains of advice from the QlikView community and flexibility and mobile access like no other. It's easy to see why QlikTech finished so high on Forbes Fast Tech 25 list, and why it is becoming more and more of a force to be reckoned with.
QlikPower is a leading provider of Professional Services for QlikView - contact us to see how we can deliver your QlikView solution in the fastest time and for the lowest cost.
Posted by Noel Shannon on Wed, May 09, 2012 @ 06:57 AM
Alfresco, the cloud connected content platform, recently announced that it has appointed QlikTech’s CEO Lars Bjork to its Board of Directors. Why has Lars taken on this position - in answer he said, "Alfresco is in a similar position to where QlikTech was just a few short years ago, with a huge market opportunity. With its unique combination of enterprise-proven cloud, mobile and on-premise content management, Alfresco has all the components to help enterprises navigate the shift to mobile and cloud productivity. Enterprises don't need a Dropbox alternative - they need Alfresco."
I think this is further evidence of the view that mobile and cloud productivity offers a bright future for technology companies. I also believe that it confirms the position that QlikView will move more and more to embrace these technologies.
Under Lars’ leadership, QlikTech has sustained tremendous growth while considerably expanding its geographic reach. Lars oversaw the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2010, which was recognized as one of the year’s top tech IPOs. Since taking the CEO position in 2007, the company has grown almost 400% from $80.6M to $320.6M, which is the valuable experience Lars brings to Alfresco as part of his role on the board.
Posted by Noel Shannon on Tue, May 01, 2012 @ 10:48 AM
The vision for QlikView was presented at the annual Qonnections partner summit in Miami last week. QlikTech VP Product Management Donald Farmer presented the themes for “QlikView.next,” the code name for the next generation of the QlikView Business Discovery platform.
QlikView.next will be a series of software releases centered around these themes:
- Gorgeous and genius. QlikView.next will continue to win the hearts of QlikView business users and IT professionals alike with a user interface that is intuitive, fun, and highly productive. QlikView.next will make it easier than ever before for users to understand the context of numbers by exploring associations, comparisons, and implications.
- Compulsive collaboration. Compulsive collaboration is collaboration that is so natural and easy that people can’t resist participating. QlikView.next will put QlikView at the forefront of users’ shared decision making.
- Mobility with agility. This theme is about access to full Business Discovery from any device. We are designing the QlikView.next user experience starting with mobile first, rather than developing a desktop experience and then modifying it to work on tablets and smartphones.
- Enabling the new enterprise. With QlikView.next, IT pros will be able to optimize their QlikView environments and offer self-service Business Discovery to growing numbers of users, utilizing ever-increasing volumes and variety of data.
- The premier platform. With QlikView.next, we are continuing to focus on delivering platform capabilities like data connectivity and application programming interfaces to our customers and partners. This theme is about enabling customers and partners to quickly and easily deliver apps and solutions that are perfectly relevant to their users and customers.
QlikTech are moving full speed ahead to execute on the QlikTech mission statement: “simplifying decisions for everyone, everywhere.” The primary influences on our vision for QlikView.next include the consumerization of IT, social software taking root at work, pervasive mobility and device independence, and the Big Data explosion. To learn more, check out the new QlikView white paper, “The Vision for ‘QlikView.next.’”
Posted by Noel Shannon on Wed, Feb 22, 2012 @ 11:14 AM
I recently read a research note from CITO, sponsored by QlikView which compares the infromation you can glean from Business Intelligence with the results of 'Search' from Google.
'Google is not BI', it states candidly, because its search results return Web pages, not answers, and corporate data is not comprised of keywords. Rather it’s information is mostly numerical and highly dimensional, and answers must be computed rather than searched.
BI systems crunch narrowly predefined questions from laboriously assembled data sets, producing answers to a predetermined set of questions. BI was designed in a computing universe of scarcity—slow processors, limited storage, and expensive memory. But today memory is cheap and hardware exponentially more powerful. As Google discovered, it’s now possible to load massive databases into memory for instant analysis. Traditional BI dashboards don’t work like this. That’s because they don’t allow instant analysis of live data; they only allow analysis of the particular data that IT was requested to include. What’s needed is a fusion of Google’s simplicity and BI’s computational abilities. A Google-ized dashboard would be fast, scalable, and utterly intuitive, allowing users to explore data by simply pointing and clicking and choosing what they want. To do that the dashboard would have to be able to, like Google, access lots of aggregated data from many different data sources, define dimensions such as customer demographics, and create associations such as sales by region. User could ask and answer their own questions through a simple search and refine results with just a few clicks.
QlikView is a new kind of BI software providing users with tools to explore and visualize information. QlikView’s patented associative in-memory architecture allows users to ask and answer their own questions. Your job is to understand data,not grapple with technology. BI is no longer as good as your IT department’s last cube—it’s as good as the questions you ask.
To download the full report please Download Here
Posted by Paddy Moore on Tue, Feb 21, 2012 @ 03:03 PM
As we launch Q200 – Our new QlikView solution for Sage 200 Customers, we would like to share with you some of the great new QlikView 11 features we exploited to build Q200.
Using the new features in QlikView 11 reduced our time to market by 20% compared to QlikView 10, and allowed us to include some fantastic new Business Discovery capabilities for our Q200 customers. QlikView already rates #1 with Gartner for ‘Satisfaction with Development Tools’, so it is fair to assume QlikView 11 will maintain this rating!
A common scenario we come across is to provide KPI analysis charts, allowing the customer to select the KPI to display, and analyse KPI performance over time, and across a range of dimensions.
With QlikView 11 Conditional Expressions this is a snap. Tick the ‘Conditional box, on the Expression Tab, of a chart, add your condition and you are done. The final screen in the Q200 Sales Order app looks like this. Clean and tidy.. Prior to QlikView 11 we would have needed 14 charts or complex expressions to create these charts, now we have 2 charts and simpler expressions.
With Q200 we aimed to produce the most useful analysis for the widest number of Sage 200 customers. The new Alternate States features were a big help. We know that customers like to compare product lines and products to each other. For example, a grocery retailer may compare the sales volumes and profitability of one product line (e.g. Snack Foods) to another (e.g. Beverages). Using QlikView 11 Alternate States we allow Q200 customers to select any 2 groups of products and compare them directly. The customer is in the driving seat!
Understanding which products, customers, sales people and locations are driving Sales Performance is of central importance to our customers. There are often valuable insights to be discovered by cross-analysing and comparing Sales across multiple dimensions. Brushing and linking is a great way to provide this understanding. Alternate States in QlikView 11 delivered this insight via a concise set of charts.
Find out more about Q200 here.
See here for a full run down of the new features in QlikView 11, including the great new server collaboration features.
Posted by Noel Shannon on Tue, Feb 14, 2012 @ 11:36 AM
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QlikPower are delighted to announce the launch of Q200, the most innovative Business Intelligence solution for Sage 200 users.
What is Q200?
• Q200 is a software application for Sage 200 Customers, immediately tells you what’s happening in your business.
• Interactive dashboards summarise the health of your business and gives you the ability to explore unlimited detail.
• Pre-loaded with metrics that measure the performance of your key business processes.
• Q200 is easy to use and requires no training!!
• You will be up and running, and exploring your data within moments.
Join us on Wednesday 22nd February to see this fantastic product in action.
‘’Qlik here to register for our online launch‘’
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