Qlik Sense — a tool for independent business analysis and data visualisation

Qlik Sense is the first solution that provides self-service business intelligence capabilities in line with the server-side development and distribution model. While most products require separate developer licenses and provide a traditional approach to developing and publishing applications, Qlik Sense provides each user with a complete set of tools to create, customize or extend visual representations from any device at any time.

The drawback of standalone business intelligence systems has always been that they have either provided extensive analysis capabilities while being inconvenient to use or have been highly user-friendly products with limited analytic functionality,» says Anthony Deighton, CTO and senior vice president of products at Qlik. — With Qlik Sense, we wanted to change that state of affairs. That’s why we built Qlik Sense on the second generation of our proprietary associative data indexing engine, but equipped it with a modern, full-featured visualization module that is powerful and intuitive.

Intelligent search and visualisation functionality speed up the intelligence acquisition

Qlik Sense users can create drag-and-drop applications that provide timely analysis through interactive reports and dashboards that play a critical role in decision-making and operations. Users are free to follow their intuition without being limited to predefined analysis algorithms or having to formulate questions in advance. Qlik’s associative data indexing engine makes it easy to identify relationships between data dimensions and extract knowledge that would remain hidden if traditional query-based hierarchical data models were used. This gives users the freedom to explore the data at any stage of analysis.

With Smart Search, users can start analysing an entire dataset by entering a few words or numbers. When a user enters a search query, the intelligent search feature builds a complete picture, revealing relationships between data and finding relevant information where other systems would not have found it. Additionally, intuitive visualisations help reveal all relationships between data dimensions and extract insights that traditional data models fail to capture. These cues help users explore patterns by dynamically updating and highlighting new information and associations.

The possibility to interact anywhere and at any time allows for a wider exchange of information

Qlik Sense puts user interaction and collaboration at the forefront. Workgroups and teams can collaborate with each other, sharing common analysis results from anywhere, anytime and on any device. The system’s touch interface and adaptive design allow visual representations to be automatically adapted to any device, so they always look their best.

The narrative functionality allows many users from any device to present their data in a presentation format at any time. In doing so, users can add comments and explanations, and jump directly from the presentation to Qlik Sense data to answer questions along the way. This helps to share information more proactively and makes it easier to explore data together.

Enterprise-level management and security tools provide centralised control

With Qlik Sense, users can create their own visual representations based on a centralised library of pre-defined data sets, graphical objects and visualizations to ensure consistent use of data and values. The state-of-the-art system architecture provides new control and management capabilities to support users working in groups and in distributed enterprise environments, including license allocation and usage monitoring through an easy-to-use interface that saves time and simplifies troubleshooting. It also helps IT enforce enterprise-grade security requirements through a flexible rules engine that provides fine-grained control during development, as well as powerful auditing and logging capabilities.
In addition, Qlik Sense provides robust data integration, making it possible to transform and merge multiple disparate data sources and perform complex analysis using them, including fast calculations, associative learning and data mining. Open APIs with powerful features allow developers to embed Qlik Sense into web pages and custom application and extend basic functions to solve specific problems.

Accessibility and price

Qlik Sense is available for purchase today. The company has also introduced a new, more flexible token-based licensing model for Qlik Sense that provides greater freedom in license management. Qlik Sense tokens can be assigned to named users or used for multiple login sessions by one or more users. The token-based licensing model allows customers to install multiple servers in different geographic regions to optimise system performance and availability at no additional cost. For more information on pricing, please contact Qlik or one of its authorised partners.

In addition to Qlik Sense’s full-featured solution for interactive data visualization, Qlik will continue to provide its well-established QlikView® platform, with which analysts with minimal application development experience can create and host powerful analytics applications. The desktop version of Qlik Sense Desktop (www.qlik.com/us/explore/ products/qlik-sense/desktop) will remain free to download.