It’s a great feeling helping a client understand their data and working with them to analyze it to get to an ‘a-ha’ moment.  Since Dataspace’s founding 15 years ago, our leaders have seen pretty much every technology that helps us help our clients.  And until recently, our CEO would comment, “they’re all pretty much the same.”  Well, he’s got a different set of talking points now.

You may have seen a few of our posts on the merits of QlikView, and now I’m proud to announce we’re Michigan’s newest QlikView partner.  Let me tell you why I’m excited.  Trite as it sounds, QlikView really is different.  Well, maybe it’s not QlikView that’s different, maybe it’s that using QlikView is a completely different experience than using other leading BI tools.  I’m not talking about features, technical architecture,  enterprise deployability or things like that – I’m talking about how, at the most basic level, using QlikView is different, and here’s how I sum it up: QlikView allows analyses that follow the way your brain thinks, not the way the data is organized.

With traditional tools you get some data, format it a certain way, and then use some kind of analysis and reporting tool to view it different ways.  If you find that you missed something, you need to go back and get more data.  If you find you have the right data, but it’s not formatted so the tool is optimized, you need to reformat it.  All this means that to use the tool, the user must bow to the data.  It makes free-thinking difficult, because if you find you want to look at the data a new way, you need to jump through hoops to get the tool to do what you want it to.  Even worse, if you need to rely on IT to reextract and reorganize the data every time you want another analysis, good luck making friends with them.

With QlikView and its database structure, you load all the data at once.  You don’t have to create cubes or other views on which to perform your reporting and analyses – QlikView’s application lets you drill down, up, sideways, it doesn’t matter – it’s all there from the start.  So, if you’re investigating which products are most profitable, and realize it would be great to see which customers buy those products, with one click they’re identified.  Want to see which products one of those customers buys?  One click to reset the products and one click to select the customer, and all the information updates again.  No more cubes, no more incremental fetches, no more bowing to the way the data is structured, no more IT SOWs.

Let your BI tool help you uncover the facts as your brain dictates.  Give QlikView a once-over.  Contact us if you’d like to discuss further.