Qlik evolves to keep up with latest AI, analytics trends

With AI becoming more prevalent over the past few years, Qlik continues to evolve.

During the self-service analytics era, Qlik was viewed as an innovator, providing one of the more powerful BI platforms along with Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. Now, years removed from a time when data visualizations were the vanguard, Qlik has remained relevant by keeping up with trends as they emerge.

Qlik's initial expansion beyond BI was to develop a data integration platform, beginning in 2018 with the acquisition of Podium Data and followed by the 2019 purchase of Attunity.

Then, like many data management and analytics vendors, Qlik responded to surging interest in generative AI development -- following OpenAI's late 2022 launch of ChatGPT -- by providing customers with a GenAI assistant and an environment to develop their own GenAI applications.

Now, with the latest trend being AI agents capable of acting autonomously to analyze data and automate processes, Qlik is adding agentic AI capabilities.

Also, with AI tools requiring large amounts of high-quality data to deliver accurate responses, Qlik is -- for the first time -- enabling customers to access unstructured data in addition to the structured data the vendor has long supported. In addition, it has launched a lakehouse built on Apache Iceberg to provide users with an end-to-end data platform.

Qlik wasn't the first to launch GenAI and agentic AI capabilities, nor has it been the most aggressive creator of an environment for customers to develop AI tools. With agentic AI in its infancy, other vendors such as Boomi have developed far more agents than the Discovery Agent that Qlik has so far introduced.

But with an emphasis on making sure customers have trusted data on which to develop analytics and AI tools, Qlik is pragmatically evolving as analytics and AI evolve to provide users with capabilities in line with current trends. Should customers want something more, the vendor's interoperability with other platforms enables users to augment Qlik's capabilities through integrations with other vendors.

Mike Capone

In a recent interview, Qlik CEO Mike Capone discussed the vendor's expansion beyond its BI roots, including the drivers behind adding data integration and AI capabilities, and Qlik's emphasis on interoperability with other vendors.

In addition, he spoke about future AI development, Qlik's balance sheet and whether an initial public stock offering is still a possibility after such plans were put on hold in 2022.

Editor's note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Qlik now has its longstanding analytics platform, a full data integration platform, an AI development environment and a lakehouse. If analytics vendors such as Tableau and MicroStrategy used to be among your top competitors, who do you see as your competitors now?

Mike Capone: We don't look at the world that way. Instead, everything is coopetition. We're partners with Databricks; we sponsor each other's conferences. Same with Microsoft and Snowflake. We aggregate tons of data into Azure, Snowflake, Databricks, AWS and others. Now, there are some overlaps. They do some stuff that we do, and we do some stuff that they do, and that's OK.

If I really look at our competition, I would say it's IT organizations that really enjoy painful integration projects, not understanding that there is a better way of building [data ecosystems].

What drove the decisions to expand beyond analytics to add capabilities that weren't Qlik's historical focus?

Capone: Every decision we made to expand resulted from listening to customers and trying to drive an outcome. We heard, 'You guys have great analytics, but getting the data is really hard,' so we bought Attunity. Then, we heard about data governance and data quality, so that led to the acquisition of Talend. Now, we're hearing that costs are getting out of control, so we acquired capabilities to do a cloud data lakehouse.

Plenty of our customers have hybrid environments -- large enterprise customers are always going to have heterogenous environments -- and we just want to meet them where they are. If they want to use Snowflake, awesome, or if they want to use Databricks, great. What if someone wanted to move data into Databricks, Snowflake and Iceberg tables, and wanted one codebase to do that? Here we are, that's Qlik.

The integration platform was the focus of expansion for a handful of years, dating back to 2018. When did Qlik decide to venture into AI development -- and now full-fledged data management with a lakehouse -- and what drove those decisions?

Capone: When I joined Qlik back in 2018, we did interviews with about 50 CIOs and asked, 'What's the future?' The immediate future was data integration, the need to harness all the data they had at their disposal. Even back then, we knew the long-term future was AI, but nobody knew how to scale it. We've had AI for a while with features like Insight Advisor that looked at applications and gave insights into data. But when GenAI hit and went mainstream, that's when we really put our foot down, and then we started making some of the new investments, with the latest being the data lakehouse.

As far as Staige, Qlik's environment for customers to develop AI and machine learning tools, where are you in your vision for what that will be -- is it done, or are you still building it up?

We'll continue to add. We've got our generic tool set around Qlik Answers and GenAI, but AI can get very vertical. ... There are also opportunities out there to do more around master data management.

Capone: We'll continue to add. We've got our generic tool set around Qlik Answers and GenAI, but AI can get very vertical. Over time, you can expect us to build out or acquire capabilities that may be more interesting for manufacturing or life sciences, for sure. There are also opportunities out there to do more around master data management.

Even though we've made a lot of acquisitions, we're in the process of recapitalizing the company right now, so we have plenty of capacity. There's nothing holding us back from making more acquisitions or investing more in research and development.

Regarding providing customers with agentic AI capabilities, is Qlik just at the start with Discovery Agent?

Capone: Yes. We always try to live within our means and not overhype our technology.

We started from the other end, with [automation capabilities] that could take action [prompted by users]. Qlik Sense, for a number of years, has enabled users to automatically change something in an external application. Now, we're coming at it from the other side with Discovery Agent and the mining capabilities of agentic AI.

Beyond Discovery Agent, what are some potential agents Qlik might develop?

Capone: We think inventory supply chain, the ability to adjust on the fly in real time based on what's going on in the world such as tariffs, is going to be huge. There are a lot of quality-of-life issues such as IT issues or customer service issues that can be addressed by agents that notice patterns -- real day-to-day issues that solve real problems.

Looking beyond Qlik, if assistants and copilots were the first wave of enterprise AI applications and agents are the current wave, what might be next?

Capone: First, I think we have to be better [with the current AI tools]. We're early days. We're in what we call the AI activation gap. Everyone is talking about AI and doing AI because their board of directors told them to, but no one is realizing the value yet. The concentration should be on getting value out of the work that's already been done and the money that's already been spent, and get some real-world wins.

But eventually, I think there's going to be a pivot toward more purpose-built AI applications. I'm bucking the trend by saying that we won't need all the data center capacity everyone thinks we're going to need, because small language models are going to be much more in fashion. What we're seeing is departmental preference to do their thing and build their own data pipeline.

With Qlik expanding beyond the traditional BI base, are you seeing the investment translate into growth?

Capone: We are seeing growth, which is double-digit and not single-digit, while running a balanced, profitable company.

One of the things we measure most is customer spend, and what we're seeing is that our existing customers are expanding dramatically with us. The number of customers spending six and seven figures continues to increase as we add these capabilities and customers buy more and more of these capabilities. And then there's our [$1 billion] recapitalization deal with Abu Dhabi Investment Authority -- they're not dumb. They've invested in OpenAI, and they saw something they liked with Qlik, which is how our investments are translating into real-world success. There aren't a lot of deals getting done right now, so we feel proud that we were able to attract a high-quality investor like that.

Three years ago, Qlik began the process of an IPO, but then market conditions put a stop to that. Is that something that's still a possibility, or has it been shelved at this point?

Capone: It's still a possibility. What we're doing with new investments is a stop along the way, and if we decide at some point that being in the public markets is in the best interests of our investors, then we would do that. But the markets seem to be a long way off from that right now in terms of being friendly. I would need to see a lot of other companies test the waters before I jump in there. It is one possible outcome for Qlik, but right now, we're playing the hand we've been dealt, and there are plenty of benefits being outside the public markets.

What would be the benefit of going public?

Capone: It would be to create liquidity for our investors and add capacity to do more things, like more acquisitions. But we've been blessed with good investors. [Qlik parent company] Thoma Bravo really understands tech, they're really supportive of what we're trying to do, so the setup is pretty good. That's why I'm not pounding on the table going, 'Darn, I really wish we could go public.' There may be a time when that's the right thing for Qlik, but right now, we're doing fine. We'll never force anything to happen. We could have forced an IPO when we filed, but we're glad we didn't because it obviously wouldn't have been the right thing.

If agentic AI and the new lakehouse were the headline additions at this year's Qlik Connect user conference, what do you think might be the key additions a year from now?

Capone: You can bet that we'll do more M&A. It could be vertical AI; it could be master data management. Our user conference is a great forcing function for us, but what I really hope to be talking about is that people are getting more value out of their investments in AI.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.