Qlik – Digital IT News

Qlik AI Council Warned AI Adoption is a Risky Gamble Without Data Integrity

Taylor Graham — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 18:00:44 +0000

During Qlik Connect 2024, the Qlik AI Council issued a stern caution to businesses: embracing AI without prioritizing data integrity poses significant risks. In their panel discussion, industry experts underscored that overlooking data quality could result in severe outcomes, such as operational failures, regulatory breaches, and financial setbacks. The Council’s collective message emphasizes the importance of robust data foundations that facilitate efficient, result-oriented, and less risky AI adoption. Ensuring diversity, timeliness, accuracy, security, discoverability, and machine-friendly accessibility of data are vital for the success of AI initiatives.

The Qlik AI Council outlined two primary risks for businesses that fail to prioritize data integrity and analytics foundations in their AI adoption strategies:

Slow Adoption and Competitive Lag: Companies that neglect the integrity of their data and analytics foundations will be hesitant to adopt AI, causing them to fall behind their competitors. This delay in AI adoption can result in missed opportunities and a widening gap that becomes increasingly difficult to bridge.
Adoption Without Integrity Leads to Crises: Businesses that rush to implement AI without focusing on the caliber and quality of their data risk facing severe consequences. These can include governance issues, regulatory breaches, inefficiencies, and poor decision-making driven by biased or inaccurate data. Such missteps can lead to significant financial losses and reputational damage.

Reflecting on the current state of enterprise AI adoption, members of the Qlik AI Council commented:

“Ensuring data integrity is crucial for the responsible deployment of AI. Without accurate, diverse, and secure data, AI systems have a greater propensity to perpetuate biases and lead to significant ethical issues,” noted Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, a leading expert in ethical AI development. “Transparency, fairness, and accountability must be embedded at every stage of AI development to build trust and ensure the technology benefits all users.”

“Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize industries and drive competitiveness, but its benefits hinge on maintaining public trust,” emphasized Nina Schick, a leading authority on AI and geopolitics. “Ensuring the authenticity and reliability of AI-generated content is crucial to prevent misinformation and uphold the integrity of our digital landscape.”

“Implementing AI in a socially responsible manner is critical for aligning with global sustainability goals,” stated Kelly Forbes, a distinguished expert in AI governance. “Businesses must adopt responsible and sustainable data practices to ensure that AI contributes to long-term economic growth and societal well-being. This approach not only mitigates risks but also fosters trust and accountability.”

“Advanced AI methodologies, like graph neural networks, hold immense potential for solving complex business problems,” noted Dr. Michael Bronstein, a pioneer in this field. “High-quality and well-structured data is essential for these technologies to succeed, enabling innovative applications that range from drug discovery to interpreting non-human communication and can potentially lead to transformative outcomes”

The Qlik AI Council was launched in January 2024 to provide continuous guidance and insight into the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Comprising distinguished experts in AI and ethics, the Council advises Qlik’s R&D and solutions teams, ensuring that AI innovations are both cutting-edge and ethically sound. By focusing on trustworthy, reliable, and minimally risky AI development, the Council aligns Qlik’s solutions with customer needs and broader societal impacts. Their expertise supports Qlik in delivering AI solutions that drive significant business outcomes while maintaining high levels of integrity.

The Council’s panel session at Qlik Connect 2024 delivered a critical message: data integrity is essential for successful AI adoption. Neglecting this can lead to severe operational, financial, and reputational issues. The Council members stressed that a focus on data and analytics foundations is vital for ethical AI development, public trust, sustainability, and innovative problem-solving. Businesses must prioritize data accuracy, diversity, security, and structure to harness AI’s full potential effectively.

To learn more about Qlik Connect 2024 or the Qlik AI Council, visit the website here.

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Data Products Leveraged to Simplify Data Management

Taylor Graham — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 18:00:49 +0000

Qlik© has revealed its acquisition of Mozaic Data (Mozaic), a cutting-edge AI-powered technology for data management. This strategic acquisition represents progress in streamlining the management of business data, with a specific emphasis on adopting a data product-oriented strategy to enhance both the quality and governance of data. The timing of this acquisition is noteworthy, as it aligns with the ongoing evolution in approaches to business data handling, emphasizing efficiency and improved standards through innovative AI-driven technologies.

Integrating Mozaic into Qlik’s portfolio brings a transformative approach to managing data as a product. “Organizations are increasingly seeking to create domain-centric data products that transcend data integration and quality. There’s an elevated expectation within the industry,” explained Stewart Bond, Vice President, Data Intelligence and Integration Software at IDC. “The focus of Qlik’s data quality and governance offerings to embody the concept of data products highlights a maturity that resonates with today’s customer needs.”

Sharad Kumar, founder of Mozaic, joins Qlik as the Regional Head of Data Integration and Quality. His expertise will further enhance Qlik’s innovative capabilities, aiming to develop a next-generation Data Product Catalog solution and allowing customers to extract more value from their data quickly and effectively.

Drew Clarke, General Manager, Data Business Unit at Qlik, emphasized, “The acquisition of Mozaic and Sharad’s expertise is a pivotal step in reshaping the data landscape, and is a significant contribution to our ongoing work for 2024. Customers recognize the importance of treating data as a product—a strategy that aligns with the need for a SaaS-based Data Product Catalog, offering a more efficient and user-friendly experience in data lifecycle management, while also reinforcing a solid foundation for AI-driven data management.”

Mozaic’s innovative Data Product Experience approach is designed following the principles of decentralized architecture. Mozaic enabled organizations to build, secure, govern, deploy, and manage domain-centric data products in the cloud. These data products can be discovered through a data product marketplace, and accessed through a broad spectrum of consumption patterns, enabling diverse business use cases.

This acquisition is set to accelerate data deployment and utilization across enterprises, especially in cloud platforms like Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric and Snowflake. The Harvard Business Review notes that treating data as a product can speed up the implementation of new use cases by 90% and reduce total cost of ownership by 30%.

Sharad Kumar commented, “Joining Qlik is a significant milestone for Mozaic Data. We share a vision to improve data consumption by maximizing value from data investments. This is an opportunity to advance the efficiency and innovation in data management driven by AI, integrating seamlessly with Qlik’s upcoming projects.”

With this acquisition, Qlik reinforces its commitment to providing end-to-end data solutions, seamlessly integrating Mozaic’s technology to enhance the overall data consumption experience for businesses.

Learn more about Qlik and the quality and governance data products.

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Qlik Adds Talend to Deliver a Leading Portfolio for Data Integration

Taylor Graham — Tue, 16 May 2023 15:00:58 +0000

Qlik® announced it has closed its acquisition of Talend, expanding the company’s best-in-class capabilities for modern enterprises to access, transform, trust, analyze, and take action with data. The combined entity is led by Qlik CEO Mike Capone, completing the latest chapter in the company’s strategic vision to deliver best-in-class data integration, data quality, and analytics solutions.

“Qlik, together with Talend, will bring significant benefits to customers, including expanded product offerings, enhanced support and services, and increased investments in innovation and R&D,” said Mike Capone. “Qlik’s broad expertise in data integration, analytics, AI and machine learning combined with Talend’s data integration and data quality solutions, will provide customers the most comprehensive solution in the industry.”

As data fragmentation, driven by thousands of sources and targets, has increased, organizations have had to choose from incomplete legacy solutions, cloud lock-in, or multiple disparate point solutions – all of which come with cost and innovation risks. With Talend, Qlik brings a new approach, offering a full range of best-in-class capabilities, helping customers eliminate technical debt and cost while increasing enterprise confidence that trusted data is available for decision making when it matters most.

“This is a perfect example of 1 + 1 equals 3. These are two market-leading companies that will enable their customers to benefit across the data and analytics lifecycle regardless of where they are in their digital transformation journey,” said Mike Leone, Principal Analyst for Analytics and AI, Enterprise Strategy Group. “So many data initiatives are seeking to build trust within the data ecosystem, and it’s not just the data. It’s the processes and people too. I’m truly excited for their joint customers. By marrying Qlik’s existing presence in the data integration space with Talend, customers will see more robust data integration capabilities and powerful data governance to deliver the confidence and trust they desire.”

Qlik and Talend solutions are complementary, extending the capabilities in many vital areas such as data quality, transformation, application connectivity, and API services. Importantly, Qlik will continue to remain open to virtually any data source, target, architecture, or methodology, ensuring customers always have the data they need, whenever they need it.

The combined entity has earned a leading position across multiple market categories. For seven years in a row, Gartner positioned Talend as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, and a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions for five consecutive years. It has positioned Qlik as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for 13 consecutive years. Additionally, Qlik has been named a leader in the IDC MarketScape: U.S. Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment.

To learn more about Qlik, visit the website HERE and for Talend visit HERE.

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Snowflake SaaS Platform Expands Real-Time Data Integrations

Taylor Graham — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 04:33:36 +0000

Qlik® announced multiple new and enhanced capabilities that will help customers maximize the value of their investment in Snowflake Data Cloud. These services expand the ability to both seamlessly feed Snowflake with near real-time data and more easily access data in real-time and action it for decision making across the enterprise.

“Customers are looking to augment their investment in Snowflake with services that accelerate the access and availability of near real-time data for modern analytics,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances of Snowflake. “We are excited about Qlik’s latest SaaS platform integrations with Snowflake, which can make it easier for customers to leverage near real-time data through Snowflake to improve decision-making across the organization with up-to-date insights.”

“Since the start of our collaboration with Qlik and Snowflake, we’ve seen some immense results. By moving the database to the cloud and having it work with Qlik’s automated solutions, we can unlock new data sources in our data warehouse within five days, instead of 20, and create new incremental data marts in days rather than weeks. We also achieved a 75% cost reduction on ETL development,” said Maikel Jaspers, BI Engineer at Ewals Cargo Care. “Now not only can we run reports more efficiently, but we can also fulfil more requests. This has given us more agility, and ultimately makes the entire company much more effective, something we’ve been striving to do for a very long time.”

Qlik enhanced its Cloud Analytics Services for Snowflake with two new features that help customers drive more value from near real-time data when deploying Qlik’s cloud platform with Snowflake. Direct Query enables users to automatically generate pushdown SQL to query Snowflake on demand from within Qlik Sense. This combines the ability to optimize Snowflake queries with immediate access to the most recent data, while allowing for the creation of best-in-class visualizations and dashboards in Qlik Sense. Qlik’s FinOps and query optimization analytic applications expand on Qlik’s existing Snowflake usage dashboards and provide CDOs and data leaders with a comprehensive understanding of what is driving Snowflake usage and how to best optimize Snowflake workloads to improve the user experience.

Qlik also released new and enhanced Qlik Cloud Data Services capabilities for Snowflake, including:

Real-time change data capture and movement to Snowflake including major databases, SAP, mainframe and SaaS applications.
Data warehouse automation for model-driven code generation, which dramatically reduces the time, cost, and risk to realize the full potential of Snowflake.
Reverse ETL to replicate enriched data from the Snowflake platform back to the operational systems of record.

“We’re seeing continued customer success and growth in demand to leverage Qlik and Snowflake together to advance cloud data analytics strategies,” said Itamar Ankorion, SVP of Technology Alliances at Qlik. “These recent new features and enhancements, including Direct Query capabilities and Cloud Data Integration Services, are part of our continued investments to innovate and help customers accelerate time to value and drive more insights and action from their data.”

For more information about how Qlik works with Snowflake visit the website here.

Image licensed by pixabay.com

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Qlik Application Automation to Drive Dynamic Actions That Deliver the Last Mile in Active Intelligence

Taylor Graham — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 16:04:31 +0000

Qlik announced the debut of Qlik Application Automation, a no-code solution designed to drive action from context-aware insights through streamlined and optimized workflows between SaaS applications and Qlik Cloud. The automated workflows now possible with Qlik Application Automation can trigger alerts, invoke downstream processes, and enhance collaboration that shortens time to value. Based on the Blendr.io acquisition, Qlik Application Automation helps deliver the last mile in Qlik’s vision of Active Intelligence, where technology and processes trigger immediate action from real-time, up-to-date and trusted data to accelerate business value across the entire data and analytics supply chain.

“The SaaS app and related data explosion has dramatically increased manual integration burdens, which limits analytics and IT teams’ ability to respond to data events with real-time insights and undercuts efforts to achieve Active Intelligence,” said James Fisher, Chief Product Officer of Qlik. “With Qlik Application Automation’s no-code, drag and drop approach to automating tasks and data workflows between Qlik Cloud and hundreds of SaaS apps, teams can more easily create the scalable connections and data flows that compel action and shorten time to value from data throughout their entire organization.”

A Statista May 2021 report shows SaaS applications accounted for 70 percent of the software used globally in 2020, with an average of 80 SaaS applications per organization, up from an estimated 8 in 2015. The explosion in SaaS-related data, along with the worldwide push to become more data-driven that was accelerated by COVID-19, has dramatically intensified IT and data team workloads. The significant hours and manual tasks required to integrate the universe of hundreds of potential SaaS applications into a coherent analytics process has limited the ability of internal teams to deliver on the promise of real-time data-driven decision-making through Active Intelligence.

Qlik Application Automation – with its no-code, drag and drop approach and native integration with Qlik Cloud – creates a seamless connection between the market’s leading analytics platform and the 3rd party SaaS applications that drive every business. With automated analytics environments, applications, and workflows, IT and data teams can dramatically increase data-driven actions with context aware insights throughout the organization. And with Qlik Application Automation’s reusable templates, teams can ensure consistency and enhance productivity, especially for tasks such as analytics DevOps, app publishing, and the delivery of insights from Qlik to collaboration tools such as Slack and MS Teams.

“With Qlik we’ve taken the first big step in gaining visibility into our entire supply chain and gained a better understanding of what’s happening in the business,” said Chris Brunton, Business Intelligence Manager at Dorel Home. “With Qlik Application Automation, we’ll be able to take the next step in activating our data to drive smart processes that can help us respond to changing conditions across the globe.”

Qlik Application Automation cuts down the time needed for programming of repetitive back-office tasks and gives more time back to teams to deliver compelling real-time analytics with:

Smart connectivity and blocks – Quickly connect to market leading SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Slack and MS Teams, represented as smart blocks, removing the need to technically understand an application’s low-level API.
No-code user interface (UI) – Simple for business users, yet also offers advanced features like conditions, variables, loops, data mapping, error handlers and templates that IT specialists can use to accelerate flow development.
Native Qlik Cloud integration – Easily build flows that leverage Qlik’s native APIs to automate your analytics DevOps processes.
Dynamic automation triggers – Invoke automation flows from a variety of mechanisms to suit specific business needs. Trigger automations on-demand, use webhooks to activate flows from events, or schedule automations to execute at specific times.
Central management and robust runtime – Manage and monitor the execution of your automations via Qlik Cloud to ensure flows are running and meeting your enterprise-wide SLAs.

“Using Qlik’s automated workflows has been a huge win for us and increased our competitiveness tenfold,” said Alex Connell, VP of Professional Services, Zift. “We’re now able to trigger processes that provide actionable data every 30 seconds, instead of 24 hours. It’s a real game changer.”

Image licensed by pixabay.com

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Qlik Launches Data Literacy 2.0 to Drive Data Fluency in the Enterprise

Taylor Graham — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 22:01:00 +0000

Qlik announces the next generation of its award-winning Data Literacy program to help drive the data fluency needed for a world witnessing continued digital acceleration. Data Literacy 2.0 is a comprehensive offering that enables companies to kickstart a data literacy program and scale it to thousands of employees.

Being able to read, work with, analyze and communicate with data is rapidly increasing in importance in both our everyday lives and in the workplace, with Qlik’s Data Literacy Index revealing that 93% of global business leaders believe it is vital for their employees to be data literate. Yet, just 21% of the global workforce feel confident in their data literacy skills and only 25% of employees felt fully prepared to use data effectively when entering their current role.

The Data Literacy 2.0 program enables organizations to start with a small initial investment, then affordably scale data literacy across the entire workforce. It is designed to take individuals from data novice to data fluent; where they can confidently interpret and work with data and help drive best practices in data-driven decision-making across their organization.

“Being data literate can’t be a specialist skillset or limited to those with technical ability. Everyone needs to be fluent in data in both their personal and professional lives,” said Dr. Paul Barth, Global Head of Data Literacy at Qlik. “As we emerge from global lockdowns and accelerate recovery plans, business leaders need to arm their employees with the skills to succeed in an increasingly digital and data-driven workplace. If they don’t, they not only risk losing talent to organizations making greater investments in employee upskilling, but they stand to undermine the future productivity, performance and competitiveness of their business.”

The Data Literacy 2.0 program includes:

Launch services: Providing best practice and hands-on support for companies, including a proven methodology for starting and scaling data literacy across the business.
Expert training: Instructor-led classes for in-depth discussions on working with data.
Skills tracking: Data literacy assessments, certifications, and dashboards to measure progress. Employees can take a 2.5-hour exam to achieve gold standard accreditation in data literacy.
Community portal: An online forum to fuel peer-to-peer data literacy collaboration across the organization.
Self-service courses: Over 20 online self-service data literacy courses and supporting resources for employees to upskill in their own time, split across two components:
Free ‘Data Fundamentals’ courses for those who are at the start of their data literacy journey including modules on Introduction to Data Literacy and Data Informed Decision Making.
Paid for ‘Data Fluency’ courses for individuals looking to dig deeper into data best practices for their organization with modules such as Foundational Analytics and Advanced Analytics.

The complete ‘data fluency’ curriculum starts at $250 per student with volume discounts for large organizations. More information on the program and pricing structure are available here: Data Literacy Program: Training, Consulting & Resources | Qlik.

As a founding member of the Data Literacy Project and as part of its commitment to creating a data-literate world, Qlik is also making the Data Fundamentals and Data Fluency courses accessible, as well as a host of free resources to help people get to grips and build confidence with data, here: https://thedataliteracyproject.org/learn

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