ProductView – The Latest on QlikView Development

QlikTech is preparing its next major release, QlikView 8, slated for May 2007.  Building on its leadership in powerful, visual and affordable in-memory analysis, QlikView 8 development themes are focused on four major areas: scaling further to support massive numbers of users; deploying massive volumes of data; allowing virtual collaboration among many end users; and enabling more predictive analytics.

Mass User Deployment

Companies need to deploy analysis to hundreds or thousands of users inside their organization, ensuring that all have access to the latest QlikView functionality. At the same time, vendors and suppliers outside the enterprise are benefiting from having access to this information as well.  QlikView 8 will simplify mass deployment even further by:

• Simplifying the deployment of the Zero-footprint client and Java client.
• Simplifying the server requirements for QlikView Server and Publisher
• Implementing a web services interface to QlikView Server
• Optimizing and simplifying installation

 Mass Document Deployment

The goal of true business intelligence is delivering personalized analysis to the right users at the right time.  The proliferation of QlikView both within the enterprise and to the “extended enterprise” demands secure and simple administration of large numbers of QlikView reports.  QlikView 8 will ensure this ability by:

• Providing direct access to QlikView Server and Publisher managed documents within the QlikView client
• Managing Publisher from inside QlikView
• Integrating installation for QlikView Server and Publisher Standard Edition
• Synchronizing releases of Server and Publisher

End User Collaboration

Improved business performance is a team effort, one that requires users to work together to find insight from data, and then share that analysis with others.  Ideally, analysis should be integrated into everyone’s daily workflow – not something done occasionally or as an extra step in business processes.  QlikView 8 will foster collaborative business intelligence through:

• Private and shared document objects, bookmarks, and reports
• QlikView Server operating as a central “hub” for managing shared objects
• The ability to click to mail bookmarks
• Threaded discussions on sheet objects
• Ability to share locally developed analysis with users by “pushing” them to the server
• Embedding QlikView in client applications (such as Office)

“Take Action” Analytics

Strategic business intelligence lies not only in analyzing the past, but also in better predicting the future.  Companies want to merge interactive analysis with users’ specific expertise for predictive analysis – making calculated business cases through what-if scenarios on budgeting and planning, for example – and then capturing results for future comparison. QlikView 8 will make sophisticated analysis smarter by:

• Creating placeholder fields, which hold data in memory and can be treated just like any other data
• Allowing data to be entered/edited in placeholder fields and distributed across aggregations as necessary

QlikView 7 has already been benchmarked at the 1 billion records mark – is 10 billion far behind?  Stay tuned for further updates on QlikView 8.