Technology & IT | Wednesday 18 February, 2015 10:23 am |

- A next-generation self-service data visualization application allows UAE users to create personalized data analyses for the first time

– Qlik®, (NASDAQ: QLIK), a leader in data discovery, today launched the newest member of its product family, Qlik® Sense, during their Qlik Day event that took place at The Westin Hotel in Dubai. Qlik® Sense is a next-generation self-service data visualization and discovery tool designed for enterprise-class governance and performance that empowers everyone to create a range of flexible, interactive visualizations that drive exploration and discovery.
In the UAE, organizations are looking at business intelligence (BI) tools to address pressing business requirements and derive comprehensive insights from larger and more complex volumes of data. The need for more pervasive business analytics has led to a strong growth in BI software regionally. UAE has been at the forefront of business analytics and big data adoption across the Middle East. Over 58 percent of CIOs in the UAE cited governance, regulation and compliance requirements as key reasons for investing in big data and analytics technologies.
The event was attended by Qlik’s leadership team led by Kerry Koutsikos, Regional Director for MEA & Turkey, and Patrik Lundblad, Visualization Advocate and Product Manager, who has delivered a keynote on “The Future of Visualization -Challenge the Conventions”. The key participants from Qlik’s customers were Hatem Elsherif, Management Information Systems Expert at UAE Ministry of Labour; Abu Dhabi Education Council; Rami Abou Jaoude, MIS & Performance Transparency Leader at Tanfeeth; and Mats Carrgrad, senior vice president, Business Performance, MEA at Virgin Mobile.
Qlik Sense is the first offering to deliver self-service BI based on a server-side development and distribution model. Whereas most products require separate developer licenses and use the traditional develop and publish, Qlik® Sense empowers every user with the full capability to create, customize, or extend visualizations from any device, at any point in time. Additionally, Qlik® Sense gives users the unrestricted ability to create personalized data analyses and explore the relationships that exist in data to reveal connections instantly. By 2015, enterprise buyers of BI platforms will predominantly purchase platforms that support both strong and broad business-user-accessible data discovery capabilities and IT-driven enterprise features for data reuse, governance, security and scalability, according to Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform report .

Kerry Koutsikos, Regional Director, Middle East, Africa & Turkey at Qlik said: “Our vision for Qlik® Sense builds on our belief that anyone in an organization should be able to easily create dynamic dashboards to explore their data to uncover meaningful insights. When we set out to create Qlik® Sense, we envisioned a world where every knowledge worker, from any device, could rapidly create visually rich analytics to explore theories, prove hypothesis, or discover new trends that can change the trajectory of their business.”

Smart Search and Smart Visualizations Accelerate Time to Insight
Qlik® Sense lets users create apps through a drag-and-drop experience that delivers relevant analysis, interactive reports, and dashboards critical to decision-making and operations. Users can freely explore their intuition since they are not limited to predefined paths they must follow or questions they must formulate ahead of time. The Qlik associative data-indexing engine allows users to easily expose relationships among data dimensions, uncovering insights that would have been hidden in traditional hierarchical, query-based data models. This provides users with the freedom to explore data at any point in their analysis.
Smart Search allows a user to simply type words or numbers to begin analysis of a data set. When a user types in a search string, Smart Search connects the dots, uncovering data relationships and information in locations that might otherwise be unnoticed. In addition, intuitive Smart Visualizations uncover all the relationships between data dimensions, revealing insights that would have been hidden in traditional data models. These cues help users explore patterns by dynamically updating and highlighting new information and associations.
Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration Enables Broader Knowledge Sharing
Qlik® Sense puts the social and collaborative experience front and center. Workgroups and teams can collaborate by collectively sharing analyses anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Its touch-driven interface and responsive design automatically adapts visualizations for the best possible experience on any device.
Data Storytelling allows multiple users, on any device to share their insights at a point in time in presentation format. Users can add commentary and narrative and drill down directly from the presentation to Qlik® Sense to answer questions on the fly. This helps to drive communication of insight and facilitates group discovery.
Enterprise-Class Governance and Security Provides Centralized Control
With Qlik® Sense, users can build their own visualizations from a centralized library of pre-built data sets, expressions, and visualizations to ensure consistent use of data and values. Its modern architecture allows new capabilities for governance and manageability to support workgroup and distributed enterprise environments, including license allocation and usage monitoring in an easy-to-use interface that saves time and simplifies troubleshooting. It also enables IT to implement enterprise-level security requirements with a flexible security-rules engine that offers granular control for progressive development with powerful audit and logging.
In addition, Qlik® Sense supports robust data integration to transform and combine multiple, disparate data sources and provide seamless analysis across them, including fast calculations, associative exploration, and search. Its open and powerful APIs give developers the ability to embed Qlik® Sense into web pages and custom applications, and extend core capabilities to meet custom needs.
Availability and Pricing
Qlik® Sense is available today. The company has also introduced a new, more flexible token-based licensing model for Qlik® Sense to provide greater flexibility for license management. Qlik® Sense tokens can be allocated to named users, or leveraged across multiple login sessions for one or more users. With the token-based licensing model, customers can deploy multiple servers, across multiple geographies, to optimize for performance and availability without paying any additional costs. For more pricing information, contact Qlik or one of its registered partners.
In addition to offering the complete Qlik® Sense offering for interactive visualization, Qlik will continue to offer its market-proven platform, QlikView®, to provide application development that enables analysts with minimal development expertise to build and publish powerful analytical applications. Qlik Sense Desktop will also continue to be available as a free download.