QlikView Review - What is it, Pros, Cons, and Suitability

Business Intelligence (BI) is an advanced functionality for businesses to extract data and convert them into opportunity. It involves much deeper analysis than data analytics solutions. Visualization tools like the Qlikview application adds to the potential of business intelligence. It gives the ability to illustrate the ideas in visual form. You can then represent the data as analytics through visual representation and data models such that it makes sense to the customers. Thus, this business intelligence and data visualization tool give the power to use data in the form of knowledge.

About QlikView

A variety of software is available for analyzing and interpreting data for business intelligence. The core objective is to easily consolidate and search the relevant data. Further, one is able to visually analyze the data to discover those business insights which were not considered before.

QlikView is one of the most flexible yet simple Business Intelligence platforms. It is designed to help organizations in extracting relevant information from the available data. By presenting the numerical data into visual form, the information holds more significance. This also helps in taking effective decisions on the basis of right interpretation of data.

The tools and functionality of QlikView supports unrestricted analysis of application data. It offers new dimensions to analyze adding value to existing data stores. With these new insights and clean and simple user interface, the visual results are easy to comprehend for one and all.

QlikView is a software product designed by QlikTech for Business Intelligence data discovery. It generates custom-made, real time dashboards pulling from different data sources and reflecting upon the business challenges for users and developers. This data interpretation help users in creating guided qlik analytics applications. Thus, one is more prompt in assessing the changes that are occurring in the business environment. This also generates prompt responses from users. As an outcome, it works by reducing time lag and adding value to the organization through the insights.

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QlikView Reviews

The reviews of QlikView present its ability of how it caters to the requirements of commercial business intelligence.This is marked by the speedy success achieved by the product ‘QlikView’ over the past few years. Every product that enters the market passes through the test and thus there are the pros and cons which get present to the world. Here are some of the pros and cons of QlikView which will help you explore it for dealing with your organization’s challenges.

The Pros:

• User-driven Approach: QlikView utilizes user-driven approach to Business Intelligence. The intuitive interface is easy to use and builds charts with negligible coding.
• BI Agility: BARC's BI Survey 10 gave highest score to QlikView for its ‘Agile BI’ ability. Agile Business Intelligence delivers faster and better results to help business grow more effective.
• Implementation: QlikView is committed to bring the fastest and smooth implementation in a very short span of time.
• Simplicity and Ease of Use: The software is extremely simple and easy to use. It is extremely fast and requires very little time and effort of staff members. This adds to the general productivity of the entire management and administration. The dashboards and reports can be easily navigated and understood even by non-IT users.
• Flexibility: Every organization has its own unique data and different set of requirements. QlikView offers incredible flexibility to its users. They can set and tweak the various objects to the minutest levels keeping even the smallest aspect in consideration. It also incorporates ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Engine. Though there is a cost to it, yet this is extremely helpful in cleansing ordinary data.
• Architectural Strength: QlikView utilizes the recent developments of IT, viz. multi-core processors, faster and cheaper memory and higher bandwidth. This advancement has given them the architectural strength which helps in reducing the cost, infrastructure resources and overall team size involved in offering BI Solutions.
• Dashboard: Based on avant-garde prebuilt dashboard applications, QlikView offers an intuitive and innovative set of dashboard which is customizable. Its associative dashboards along with advanced search capabilities make it a perfect fit for business intelligence and data visualization requirements.
• Data Consolidation: The QlikView tools consolidate data in a highly effective manner. Manual reporting and analysis has scope for error.  This eliminates the scope of human error. It also shows up as good saving in terms of money and time.
• Filtering of Data: The filtering tools of the application are so powerful that they render the graphs and tables very fast. It is easy to set up filtering of all sorts to get data in useful visual form.
• Use of RAM of the server: QlikView handles data input very smoothly. It keeps the data in memory stored in the RAM of the server. This data is simultaneously available for multiple users. This makes the queries faster and the user experience with data exploration and amelioration is faster.
• Identification of  operational inefficiencies: After utilizing the front-end information available for the organization, it can process the information and help in identifying the areas of operational inefficiencies. When the organization gets present to these facts, it is able to take significant steps for improving the efficiency of the system.

Read More: Know what is Tableau and what makes it better than Excel

The Cons:

QlikView is a great tool with potential to transform the ways businesses operate. It is inclined to show the fallacies and scope for improvement in business operations. The data interpretations are so apt that it makes instant sense for the users. Thus, it helps in producing desired results towards business excellence. Yet there is always scope for improvement to remain the best in the industry and satisfy the changing needs of its users. Here are some of the cons faced by QlikView.

• Expansive Product Strategy:  No product can survive without having a sustainable approach to win the competition. Despite offering great features, the roadmap for expansive product strategy lacks clarity. Hence it will be a challenge to sustain itself within competition.
• Considerably Expensive:  As part of user survey, a significant one-third customers felt the price to be on the higher side. The pricing model lacks flexibility when the larger organizations have more users. Also the pricing is quite complicated and confusing. This may lead to novice users feeling trapped in its ‘Document License’ which cites the work conditions in slightly vague manner. When the cost factor seems to be rising beyond your expectations, this may be an unpleasant surprise.
• Performance with respect to Speed: The captivating features of QlikView are not sufficient to keep the users happy. Around 11.6% customers have shown dissatisfaction on the poor performance with respect to its ‘blistering speed’. Being better than the competitors is still accountable for the customer dissatisfaction.
• Reporting on Email:  When it comes to sharing and reporting on emails, the entire functionality is terribly designed.
• Automated combination of filters: Some of the data aspects which are automatically combined during filtering are completely unintended.
• Upgrade of Server RAM:  Using the RAM of the server is a great advantage in case of multiple users. Yet there are no visible plans for the upgrade of the RAM of the server. With increasing number of users because of the value it offers, the RAM limitation can raise a question on the effectiveness of the product.
• Usability: QlikView is highly sophisticated yet can be easily used by an ordinary user. But, it can be tedious for a non-technical person to build reports which add value in decision-making. This requires high level coding skills, good working knowledge of SQL and a formal training for using QlikView’s proprietary query language.
• Not designed for non-technical staff:  Although QlikView exhibits great value to organizations, but in case a non-technical user wants to extract some relevant information out of the available data, it is impossible for that person to avail self-service and view the results.

Suitability of QlikView in different Environments

QlikView caters to the business intelligence requirements of organizations. With its self-BI capabilities, it has proven to be of great value to big and small organizations alike. Moreover its functionalities are of benefit for all market sectors. This makes it suitable to be used by all type of business organizations irrespective whether they are small, medium or large enterprise. Coupled with customer satisfaction with respect to its performance, the reviews reflect upon the credibility and suitability of the product. Whatever by the category of business and the scope of project, QlikView has stood up  to fulfill the expectations set by the customers. On the basis of customer feedback, it has been accepted as the best suited Business Intelligence tool for the project it was chosen for.

After having an in-depth review of QlikView, there is every possibility of analyzing the product before investing into it. Yet with the increasing user base, it is quite clear to conclude that QlikView is a great BI Tool by QlikTech. Starting with the product development and introducing it into the market as a startup, it is definitely for them to navigate through the test of time with some more innovations and establish themselves as market leaders in the domain of Business Intelligence and Data Visualization.

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