QlikTech’s IPO & Vigilante BI
by Pete Bell
We’re often asked about how Endeca’s BI offering compares to QlikView — more than usual with their “heavily oversubscribed” IPO this morning of their parent company QlikTech (QLIK).
The comparisons aren’t surprising. If you read their S-1 IPO filing, you’ll find spots where you could cut-and-paste “Endeca” for “QlikView.” For example,
“We have pioneered a powerful, easy-to-use business intelligence solution that enables our customers to make better and faster business decisions. Our software platform, QlikView, combines enterprise-class analytics and search functionality with the simplicity and ease-of-use found in office productivity software tools for a broad set of business users.”
Despite this, we rarely compete. One reason is that our products have material differences. But we don’t usually get down to the product because upstream of that, we’re each going at this expanding BI market from different directions.
Appeasing the Angry Mob
Like QLIK, Endeca is addressing the need for BI on many more desks than classic BI can reach today. As Gartner puts it in their SWOT analysis of Qlik (which also mentions Endeca as a competitor), “According to Gartner BI user surveys, fewer than one-quarter of potential users use BI today.”
All those left-out users make a stink about it. Each time they get a BI report, it answers one question, but invariably raises new ones that it can’t answer in the moment, .e.g Demand went up….Why? So the consumer requests new views of the data from IT. It’s a hydra — each time a report answers a question, it engenders new ones. And that’s one root cause of the BI backlog, as Paul Sonderegger blogged in How Big Is The BI Backlog?
Angry mobs take matters into their own hands. That’s where QLIK sniffed a market for their vigilante BI. The beauty of their product is end-users can install and use it on their own, bypassing IT entirely. In fact, their business model is predicated on vigilante BI. From their S-1,
We have a differentiated business model designed to accelerate the adoption of our product by reducing the time and cost to purchase and implement our software. Our low risk approach to product sales provides a needed alternative to costly, all-or-nothing, traditional business intelligence sales models by offering free product downloads to individuals and a 30-day money back guarantee upon purchase. We initially focus on specific business users or departments within a prospective customer’s organization and seek to solve a targeted business need. After demonstrating QlikView’s benefits to initial adopters within an organization, we work to expand sales of our product to other business units, geographies and use cases with a long-term goal of broad organizational deployment.
But that final part of their “land and expand” strategy is in question. They want to give self-service BI to individual members of the angry mob, with the aspiration that IT will eventually sanction the approach. But a product designed for end-users isn’t necessarily aligned with IT objectives, like, say, data governance. Gartner cites limitations to centralization as a weakness in their SWOT:
“QlikView is rarely enterprisewide BI because of limitations with metadata.” Expanding on this, “QlikTech has very few examples in which a single QlikView instance is used for BI metadata for all BI applications, rather than for a number of disconnected QlikView implementations. Because of the nature of siloed deployments in business units, and because there is no enterprise metadata layer or a central metadata repository across QlikView applications, it is difficult to create an enterprisewide BI view with QlikView, in which cause and effect relationships are established.”
QlikView serves individual users well, but those silos don’t aggregate up into a centralized IT deployment.
Endeca comes at this large untapped market from a different direction: we’re IT’s choice for Agile BI. Our customers tend to be IT directors in the Fortune 500 that are on the other end of the angry mob. They pick Endeca because it lets them clear out a healthy amount of their BI backlog. They can publish out many new views of enterprise data, while also meeting classic IT goals on security, reliability, and scalability.
So that’s how Endeca compares to QlikTech. We both see a big market in the angry mob. But we want to serve them in different ways, and reflecting that, our products, architectures, and go-to-market are quite different. If the QLIK IPO is a good indicator of which way the BI market is going, justice is coming for the angry mob, and it’s coming from the outlaws and the sheriffs.
