QlikView (Ticker: QLIK) has been a poster child of BI since 2006 growing at a record double digit pace and becoming the envy of many large BI players (by not direct competing with them but still out-pacing on sales and customer growth). Many executives at large firms (un)proudly speak of QlikView as a strong competitor. Pretty good achievement! Take a look at the following graphics below that captures all company vitals -
As QLIK grows, it faces an interesting challenge as faced by every company standing at the gates on an inflection point - transitioning to a larger company. Here are some of the issues identified by identified by Gartner for QLIK - ( I am pretty confident that QLIK will continue to execute well in near-term but it definitely has to resolve all of these issues mentioned below)
QlikTech offers limited metadata management. As QlikView grows into larger BI deployments spanning the enterprise, the lack of an enterprise semantic layer becomes a more pressing issue. Filling this gap requires additional cost and effort in the management of metadata to lock down common definitions and calculations, and to conform dimensions for cross-functional analysis across QlikView applications.
QlikTech's focus on analysis and usability for end users delivers significant advantages. However, its lack of a number of broad BI platform capabilities (high volume enterprise reporting, planning/financially oriented OLAP, Microsoft Office integration, scorecarding and predictive modelling) means that it will almost always need to be used alongside another BI platform.
QlikView is increasingly seen as expensive — almost a third of its customers surveyed (31.4% vs. 26.1% in the whole sample) see this as its main barrier to wider use. Its pricing model often does not sit well with larger deployments to more users, nor does the investment in RAM required to support the increasing numbers of concurrent users.
