With AI the dominant trend in data and analytics, the vendor's leader leaves after guiding it through its cloud transition and additions of data integration and AI capabilities.
Mike Capone is stepping down from his role as CEO of Qlik.
Mike Capone
Mike Lipps, Qlik's board chair, has been named interim CEO while the vendor's board conducts a search for a permanent successor, according to a Qlik spokesperson.
Capone's move comes just over two weeks after Qlik held Connect, its annual user conference in Kissimmee, Fla., where it unveiled new features collectively aimed at helping customers deploy the vendor's AI tools to generate insights as well as develop, deploy and manage agents and other AI applications of their own.
"After more than eight years as CEO of Qlik, I've made the difficult decision that now is the right time for me to step down from the role," Capone posted on LinkedIn. "Leading Qlik has been a true privilege. I've been fortunate to work alongside friends and colleagues who care deeply, customers who pushed us to be better, and partners who have helped take Qlik further than we could have alone."
Based in King of Prussia, Penn., Qlik is a longtime analytics vendor that under Capone's leadership evolved into a more full-featured data platform provider featuring data integration and AI capabilities.
Leadership in changing times
Capone was appointed Qlik's CEO in January 2018 after serving three years as chief operating officer at Medidata Solutions.
His resignation comes at a time when the data management and analytics industries are evolving. Capone joined Qlik during an era when self-service analytics fueled by robust data visualizations represented the cutting edge of business intelligence (BI).
Qlik was viewed as one of the leading BI vendors, but was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2016 for $3 billion and taken private so the vendor could transform for the cloud away from the scrutiny of the public market. Qlik launched Qlik Sense Cloud Business in 2016, which was replaced in 2018 by Qlik Sense Business, a fully managed SaaS version of the vendor's enterprise analytics platform deployed on Qlik's own cloud.
By January 2022, after a 5-year process to reorganize and expand by adding data integration capabilities through a series of acquisitions, Qlik filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public stock offering and a return to the public markets. However, economic uncertainty delayed Qlik's plans, and then OpenAI's November 2022 launch of ChatGPT sparked a seismic change for all data management and analytics vendors.
Suddenly, with customers turning their attention to AI development rather than traditional BI tools such as reports and dashboards, data management and analytics providers had to become enablers of AI rather than analytics.
Qlik evolved to meet the needs of its customers, making AI its focal point over the past few years. Going forward, as Qlik continues to progress, it will do so under the leadership of a new CEO.
[Capone] inherited a well-regarded BI vendor and walked out with a full-stack data, integration and AI platform that the majority of the world's largest enterprises actually depend on. The piece that impressed me most was the agentic pivot over the last 18 months.
Mike LeoneAnalyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
Perhaps Qlik's most significant growth under Capone came with respect to agentic AI, according to Mike Leone, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy who followed Qlik throughout Capone's tenure.
"[Capone] inherited a well-regarded BI vendor and walked out with a full-stack data, integration and AI platform that the majority of the world's largest enterprises actually depend on," Leone said. "The piece that impressed me most was the agentic pivot over the last 18 months, which landed faster and with more coherence than what I've seen from most of his peers in the legacy analytics space."
In addition, revenue growth, successfully integrating an array of acquired companies and building a strong leadership team are among Capone's noteworthy accomplishments, he continued.
Donald Farmer, founder and principal of consulting firm TreeHive Strategy and Qlik's vice president of innovation and design from 2011-16, similarly noted that Capone took over as the vendor's CEO at a difficult time and led the vendor's expansion into data integration and AI.
"Mike Capone led Qlik through an unenviable period," he said. "Leveraged buyouts by private equity are a notoriously uncomfortable experience for staff, customers and partners. And with changes in market conditions, this has been a particularly complex time. … Capone has sustained Qlik as a largely cohesive company and technology stack, which must have been a great challenge."
In addition to Qlik, established data and analytics vendors such as Alteryx, Sisense, Snowflake, Tableau and ThoughtSpot have all changed their CEOs over the past few years, as the market has transitioned from a focus on traditional analytics to AI as a means of managing, exploring and analyzing data, and vendors have had to shift their strategic focus.
Meanwhile, others including Confluent and Informatica were acquired -- and Fivetran and DBT Labs elected to merge -- as the high cost of AI development makes it more difficult for independent specialists to compete with full-featured platform vendors.
"As AI and agentic technologies reshape the world, the organizations that seize this opportunity will be those that can turn trusted data into meaningful action," Capone wrote on LinkedIn. "I am confident that Qlik is strongly positioned to help customers do exactly that."
One of Capone's most significant accomplishments as Qlik's CEO was to help the vendor to do just what he suggested other organizations do, which is to evolve with the times, according to David Menninger, an analyst at ISG Software Research.
"Capone has led a two-pronged evolution of Qlik," he said. "First, he oversaw the transition from on-premises software delivery and perpetual licensing to cloud-based software-as-a-service-model subscription licensing. Second, he oversaw the extension of Qlik from an analytics-only focus to a data and analytics focus and eventually into AI as well."
The next CEO
While Qlik declined to specify what traits and experience it will be looking for in its next CEO, it's likely that someone committed to Qlik's role as the connective layer for AI will be the vendor's next leader, according to Leone.
When Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman departed in February 2024, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who had been Snowflake's senior vice president of AI for nine months after joining Snowflake in 2023 when the vendor acquired Neeva, was named its new leader. Since then, Snowflake, which was slower to embrace AI than some of its competitors, has aggressively added AI capabilities and built an environment for customers to develop AI tools.
Similarly, among others, ThoughtSpot and Tableau have focused on AI and kept up with the latest trends in AI development as their leadership has changed.
"I'd want someone fluent in the full data and AI stack as a system, with depth that reaches well beyond analytics," Leone said. "Qlik's competitive ground now is the connective tissue between data integration, governance, and agentic execution, and the next leader has to be able to hold that whole picture and prioritize across it."
Priorities for the new CEO should include continuing Qlik's momentum with agentic AI, upgrading governance features that engender trust in SI outputs, and improving messaging related to its data engineering and lakehouse capabilities, he continued.
Menninger likewise suggested that Qlik's next CEO will need to focus on properly positioning the vendor with respect to AI given that competition includes not only other data and analytics vendors but also large language model developers.
"Qlik and other analytics providers face competition from multiple fronts," he said. "In addition to guiding Qlik through the competitive landscape, the new leader will also have to navigate the financial markets, creating a path for investors to recoup their investments."
Qlik, however, is not alone among analytics providers with respect to needing to find its role as AI continues to gain prominence, Menninger continued.
"The key to Qlik's future, and many other analytics vendors, is how they tackle the AI world," he said. "In much the same way that Qlik had to manage the transition from on premises to cloud, they need to successfully manage the transition from BI to AI."
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than three decades of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
Mike Capone
