Happy New 2013!

My best wishes for 2013!

2012 was extraordinary for Data Visualization community and I expect 2013 will be even more interesting than 2012. For Data Visualization vendors 2012 was unusual YEAR and surprised many people.

We can start with Qliktech, which grew only about 18% in 2012 (while in 2011 it was 42% and in 2010 it was 44%) and QLIK stock lost a lot… Spotfire on other hand grew faster then that and Tableau grew even faster than Spotfire. Tableau doubled its workforce and its sales now more than $100M per year. Together the sales of Qlikview, Spotfire and Tableau totaled to almost $600M in 2012 and I expect it may reach even $800M in  2013. All other vendors becoming less and less visible on market. While it is still possible to have a breakthrough from companies like Microsoft, Microstrategy, Visokio and Pagos, it is highly unlikely.

If you will search in web for wishes or wishlists for Qlikview or Tableau or Spotfire, you can find plenty of wishes, including even very technical. I will partially repeat myself, because some of my best wishes are still wishes and may be some of them will be never implemented. I will restrict myself to 3 best wishes per vendor.

Let me start with Spotfire, as the most mature product. I will use analogy: EMC did spin-off VMWare and (today) market capitalization of VMWare is close $40B, about 75% (!) of Market Capitalization of its parent company EMC! I wish that TIBCO will do the same to Spotfire as EMC did to VMWare. Compare with this wish all other wishes look minimal, like making Free Spotfire Desktop Reader (similar to what Tableau has) and make part of Spotfire Silver is completely Public and Free similar to … Tableau Public.

For Qliktech I really wish them to stop bleeding capitalization-wise (did they lost $1B of MktCap during last 9 months?) and sales-wise (growing only 18% in 2012 compare with 42% in 2011). May be 2013 is good time for IBM to buy Qliktech? And yes, I wish Qlikview Server on Linux (I do not like new licensing terms of Windows 2012 Server) and I wish (for many years!) free Qlikview Desktop Viewer/Reader (similar … to Tableau Reader) in 2013 to enable  server-less distribution of Qlikview-based Data Visualizations!

For Tableau I wish a very successful IPO in 2013 and I wish them to grow in 2013 as fast as they did in 2012! I really wish Tableau (and all its processes like VizQL, Application Server, Backgrounder etc.) to became 64-bit in 2013 and of course I wish Tableau Server on Linux (see my wish for Qlikview above).

Since I still have my best wishes for Microsoft (I guess they will never listen me anyway), I wish them to stop in 2013 using the dead product (Silverlight) with Power View (just complete the switch to HTML5 already), to make it completely separate from SharePoint and make it equal part of Office (integrated with PowerPivot on Desktop) the same way as Visio and Access are parts of Office and as a result I wish Microsoft to have a Power View (Data Visualization) Server (integrated with SQL Server 2012 of course) as well.

Also here are Flags of 21 countries from where this blog got most visitors in 2012:

 

Qlikview can go outside RAM, finally

Qlikview 10 was released around 10/10/10, Qlikview 11 – around 11/11/11, so I expected Qlikview 12 to be released on 12/12/12 but “instead” we are getting Qlikview 11.2 with Direct Discovery in December 2012, which supposedly provides a “hybrid approach so business users can get the QlikView associative experience even with data that is not stored in memory”

This feature demanded by users (me included) for a long time, but I think noise around so called Big Data and competition forced Qliktech to do it. Spotfire has it for a longtime (as well as 64-bit implementation) and Tableau has something like that for a while (unfortunately Tableau still 32-bit) . You can test Beta of it, if you have time: http://community.qlikview.com/blogs/technicalbulletin/2012/10/22/qlikview-direct-discovery-beta-registration-is-open

Just 8 months ago Qliktech estimated its sales for 2012 as $410M and suddenly 3 months ago it changed its estimates down to $381M, just 19% over 2011, which is in huge contrast with Qliktech’s previous speed of growth and way behind the current speed of growth of Tableau and even less then current speed of growth of Spotfire. During last 2 years QLIK stock unable to grow significantly:

and all of the above forcing Qliktech to do something outside of gradual improvements – new and exciting functionality needed and Direct Discovery may help!

QlikView Direct Discovery enables users to perform visual analysis against “any amount of data, regardless of size”. With the introduction of this unique hybrid approach, users can associate data stored within big data sources directly alongside additional data sources stored within the QlikView in-memory model. QlikView can “seamlessly connect to multiple data sources together within the same interface”, e.g. Teradata to SAP to Facebook allowing the business user to associate data across the data silos. Data outside of RAM can be joined with the in-memory data with the common field names. This allows the user associatively navigate both on the direct discovery and in memory data sets.

QlikView developer should setup the Direct Discovery table on the QlikView application load script to allow the business users to query the desired big data source. Within the script editor a new syntax is introduced to connect to data in direct discovery form. Traditionally the following syntax is required to load data from a database table:

To invoke the direct discovery method, the keyword “SQL” is replaced with “DIRECT”.

In the example above only column CarrierTrackingNumber and ProductID are loaded into QlikView in the traditional manner, other columns exist in the data table within the Database including columns OrderQty and Price. OrderQty and Price fields are referred as “IMPLICIT” fields. An implicit field is a field that QlikView is aware of on a “meta level”. The actual data of an implicit field resides only in the database but the field may be used in QlikView expressions. Looking at the table view and data model of the direct discovery columns are not within the model (on the OrderFact table):

Once the direct discovery structure is established, the direct discovery data can be joined with the in-memory data with the common field names (Figure 3). In this example, “ProductDescription” table is loaded in-memory and joined to direct discovery data with the ProductID field. This allows the user to associatively navigate both on the “direct discovery” and in memory data sets.

Direct Discovery will be much slow then in-memory processing and this is is expected, but it will take away from Qlikview its usual claim that is is faster then competitors. QlikView Direct Discovery can only be used against SQL compliant data sources. The following data sources are supported;

• ODBC/OLEDB data sources – All ODBC/OLEDB sources are supported, including SQL Server, Teradata and Oracle.
• Custom connectors which support SQL – Salesforce.com, SAP SQL Connector, Custom QVX connectors for SQL compliant data stores.

Due to the interactive and SQL syntax specific nature of the Direct Discovery approaches a number of limitations exist. The following chart types are not supported;
• Pivot tables
• Mini charts
And the following QlikView features are not supported:
• Advanced aggregation
• Calculated dimensions
• Comparative Analysis (Alternate State) on the QlikView objects that use Direct
Discovery fields
• Direct Discovery fields are not supported on Global Search
• Binary load from a QlikView application with Direct Discovery table

Here is a some preliminary video about Direct Discovery, published by Qliktech:

It was interesting to me that just 2 days after Qliktech pre-anounced Direct Discovery it also partners with Teradata. Tableau partners with Teradata for a while and Spotfire did it a month ago, so I guess Qliktech trying to catchup in this regard as well. I mentioned it only to underscore the point of this blog post: Qliktech realized that it behind its competitors in some areas and it has to follow ASAP.

 

LinkedIn Stats about Data Visualization tools

I used LinkedIn for years to measure of how many people mentioning Data Visualization tools on their profiles, of how many LinkedIn groups dedicated to those DV tools and what group membership is. Recently these statistics show dramatic changes in favor of Qlikview and Tableau as undisputed leaders in people’s opinions.

Here is how many people mentioned specific tools (statistics were updated on 9/4/12 and numbers changing every day) on their profiles:

• Tableau – 18584,
• Qlikview  - 17471,
• Spotfire – 3829,
• SAS+JMP – 3443,
• PowerPivot – 2335

Sample of “People” search URL: http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?type=people&keywords=Tableau or http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?type=people&keywords=SAS+JMP

Here is how many groups dedicated to [in brackets a "pessimistic" estimate of total non-overlapping membership]:

• Qlikview – 169 [13000+],
• Tableau – 76 [6000+],
• Spotfire – 29 [2000+],
• SAS (+AND+) JMP - 23 [2000+],
• PowerPivot – 16 [2000+]

Sample of “Group” search URL: http://www.linkedin.com/search-fe/group_search?pplSearchOrigin=GLHD&keywords=Qlikview

 

Data Visualization tool is a Presentation Tool

(this is a repost from my other Data Visualization blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/tableau-as-container/ )

Often I used small Tableau (or Spotfire or Qlikview) workbooks instead of PowerPoint, which are proving at least 2 concepts:

• Good Data Visualization tool can be used as the Web or Desktop Container for Multiple Data Visualizations (it can be used to build a hierarchical Container Structures with more then 3 levels; currently 3: Container-Workbooks-Views)

• It can be used as the replacement for PowerPoint; in example below I embedded into this Container 2 Tableau Workbooks, one Google-based Data Visualization, 3 image-based Slides and Textual Slide: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/TableauInsteadOfPowerPoint/1-Introduction

• Tableau (or Spotfire or Qlikview) is better then PowerPoint for Presentations and Slides

• Tableau (or Spotfire or Qlikview) is the Desktop and the Web Container for Web Pages, Slides, Images, Texts

• Good Visualization Tool can be a Container for other Data Visualizations

• Sample Tableau Presentation above contains the Introductory Textual Slide

• Sample Tableau Presentation above  contains a few Tableau Visualization:This Tableau Presentation contains a Web Page with the Google-based Motion Chart Demo

  1. The Drill-down Demo

  2. The Motion Chart Demo ( 6 dimensions: X,Y, Shape, Color, Size, Motion in Time)

• This Tableau Presentation contains a few Image-based Slides:

  1. The Quick Description of Origins and Evolution of Software and Tools used for Data Visualizations during last 30+ years

  2. The Description of Multi-level Projection from Multidimensional Data Cloud to Datasets, Multidimensional Cubes and to Chart

  3. The Description of 6 stages of Software Development Life Cycle for Data Visualizations

 

Tableau vs. Qlikview

Some people pushing me to answer on recent Donald Farmer’s comments on my previous post, but I need more time to think about it.

Meanwhile today Ted Cuzzillo published an interesting comparison of Qlikview vs. Tableau here:

http://datadoodle.com/2012/04/24/tableau-qlikview/

named “The future of BI in two words” which made me feel warm and fuzzy about both products and unclear about what Ted’s judgement is?

Fortunately I had a more “digitized” comparison of these 2 Data Visualization Leaders, which I did a while ago for a different reason. So I modified it a little to bring it up-to-date and you can see it for yourself below. Funny thing is that even I used 30+ criterias to measure and compare those two brilliant products, final score is almost identical for both of them, so it is still warm and fuzzy.

Basically conclusion is simple: each product is better for certain customers and for certain projects, there is no universal answer (yet?):

 

Power View: 3rd strike and Microsoft out?

The short version of this post: as far as Data Visualization is a concern, the new Power View from Microsoft is the marketing disaster, the architectural mistake and the generous gift from Microsoft to Tableau, Qlikview, Spotfire and dozens of other vendors.

For the long version – keep reading.

Assume for a minute (OK, just for a second) that new Power View Data Visualization tool from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is almost as good as Tableau Desktop 7. Now let’s compare installation, configuration and hardware involved:

Tableau:

1. Hardware:  almost any modern Windows PC/notebook (at least dual-core, 4GB RAM).
2. Installation: a) one 65MB setup file, b) minimum or no skills
3. Configuration: 5 minutes – follow instructions on screen during installation.
4. Price – $2K.

Power View:

1. Hardware: you need at least 2 server-level PCs (each at least quad-core, 16GB RAM recommended). I will not recommend to use 1 production server to host both SQL Server and SharePoint; if you desperate, at least use VM(s).
2. Installation: a) Each Server  needs Windows 2008 R2 SP1 – 3GB DVD; b) 1st Server needs SQL Server 2012 Enterprise or BI Edition – 4GB DVD; c) 2nd Server needs SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition – 1GB DVD; d) A lot of skills and experience
3. Configurations: Hours or days plus a lot of reading, previous knowledge etc.
4. Price: $20K or if only for development it is about $5K (Visual Studio with MSDN subscription) plus cost of skilled labor.

As you can see, Power View simply cannot compete on mass market with Tableau (and Qlikview and Spotfire) and time for our assumption in the beginning of this post is expired. Instead now is time to remind that Power View is 2 generations behind Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire. And there is no Desktop version of Power View, it is only available as a web application through web browser.

Power View is a Silverlight application packaged by Microsoft as a SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition. Power View is (ad-hoc) report designer providing for user an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation web experience. Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight in favor of HTML5, but Silverlight survived (another mistake) within SQL Server team.

Previous report designers (still available from Microsoft:  BIDS, Report Builder 1.0, Report Builder 3.0, Visual Studio Report Designer) are capable to produce only static reports, but Power View enables users to visually interact with data and drill-down all charts and Dashboard similar to Tableau and Qlikview.

Power View is a Data Visualization tool, integrated with Microsoft ecosystem. Here is a Demo of how the famous Hans Rosling Data Visualization can be reimplemented with Power View:

Compare with previous report builders from Microsoft, Power View allows many new features, like Multiple Views in a Single Report, Gallery preview of Chart Images, export to PowerPoint, Sorting within Charts by measures and Categories, Multiple Measures in Charts, Highlighting of selected data in reports and Charts, Synchronization of Slicers (Cross-Filtering), Measure Filters, Search in Filters (convenient for a long lists of categories), dragging data fields into Canvas (create table) or Charts (modify visualization), convert measures to categories (“Do Not Summarize”), and many other features.

As with any of 1st releases from Microsoft, you can find some bugs from Power View. For example, KPIs are not supported in Power View in SQL Server 2012, see it here: http://cathydumas.com/2012/04/03/using-or-not-using-tabular-kpis/

Power View is not the 1st attempt to be a full player in Data Visualization and BI Market. Previous attempts failed and can be counted as Strikes.

Strike 1: The ProClarity acquisition in 2006 failed, there have been no new releases since v. 6.3; remnants of ProClarity can be found embedded into SharePoint, but there is no Desktop Product anymore.

Strike 2: Performance Point Server was introduced in November, 2007, and discontinued two years later. Remnants of Performance Point can be found embedded into SharePoint as Performance Point Services.

Both failed attempts were focused on the growing Data Visualization and BI space, specifically at fast growing competitors such as Qliktech, Spotfire and Tableau. Their remnants in SharePoint functionally are very behind of Data Visualization leaders.

Path to Strike 3 started in 2010 with release of PowerPivot (very successful half-step, since it is just a backend for Visualization) and xVelocity (originally released under name VertiPaq). Power View is continuation of these efforts to add a front-end to Microsoft BI stack. I do not expect that Power View will gain as much popularity as Qlikview and Tableau and in my mind Microsoft will be a subject of 3rd strike in Data Visualization space.

One reason I described in very beginning of this post and the 2nd reason is absence of Power View on desktop. It is a mystery for me why Microsoft did not implement Power View as a new part of Office (like Visio, which is a great success) – as a new desktop application, or as a new Excel Add-In (like PowerPivot) or as a new functionality in PowerPivot or even as a new functionality in Excel itself, or as new version of their Report Builder. None of these options preventing to have a Web reincarnation of it and such reincarnation can be done as a part of (native SSRS) Reporting Services – why involve SharePoint (which is – and I said it many times on this blog – basically a virus)?

I am wondering what Donald Farmer thinking about Power View after being the part of Qliktech team for a while. From my point of view the Power View is a generous gift and true relief to Data Visualization Vendors, because they do not need to compete with Microsoft for a few more years or may be forever. Now IPO of Qliktech making even more sense for me and upcoming IPO of Tableau making much more sense for me too.

Yes, Power View means new business for consulting companies and Microsoft partners (because many client companies and their IT departments cannot handle it properly), Power View has a good functionality but it will be counted in history as a Strike 3.

 

Panopticon partners with Qliktech

In unusual, interesting (what it means? is it promising or what?) move the two Data Visualization leaders (Panopticon and Qliktech) partners today, see

http://panopticon.com/Panopticon-Software-Partners-with-QlikTech-to-Provide-Real-Time-Visual-Data-Monitoring-and-Analysis-Dashboards

“to offer enhanced, real-time visualization capabilities for the QlikView Business Discovery platform”.

Panopticon’s press-release looks overly submissive to me:

“As a member of QlikTech’s Qonnect Partner Program for Technology Partners, Panopticon supports QlikView desktop, web, and mobile interactive dashboards and allows users to filter and interact directly with real-time data. By integrating Panopticon into their systems, QlikView users can:

• Federate reference and real-time streaming data as well as conflated time series data sets;

• Connect to virtually any relational or column-oriented database, including tick databases;

• Connect to real-time message queues;

• Connect to Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines; and

• Make full use of Panopticon’s library of visualizations designed specifically to analyze financial data.

The combined Panopticon-QlikView platform is now available for immediate installation.”

Panopticon integration into QlikView dashboards utilizes QlikView UI extension objects within the web browser. The extension object calls Panopticon “web parts” and creates a Panopticon extension object with a number of pre-defined properties. The defined context/data is passed into the Panopticon extension object. The Panopticon “web parts” call a Panopticon EX Java applet and renders the requested Panopticon visualization workbook within the context defined by the QlikView user. The Panopticon component executes parameterized URL calls and parameterized JavaScripts to update the parent QlikView display.

Qliktech is trying to be politically correct and its Michael Saliter, Senior Director Global Market Development – Financial Services at QlikTech said, “Our partnership with Panopticon allows us to incorporate leading real-time visualization capabilities into our QlikView implementations. We recognize the importance of providing our clients with truly up-to-date information, and this new approach supports that initiative. Our teams share a common philosophy about proper data visualization design. This made it easy to develop a unified approach to the presentation of real-time, time series, and static data in ways that people can understand in seconds.”

While I like when competitors are cooperating (it benefits users and hopefully improve sales for both vendors), I still have a question: Qliktech got a lot of money from IPO, had a lot of sales and hired a lot of people lately; why they (Qlikview Developers) was not able to develop real-time functionality themselves?

Hugh Heinsohn, VP of Panopticon, said to me: “we (Panopticon) don’t see ourselves as competitors – and neither do they (Qliktech). When you get into the details, we do different things and we’re working together closely now”

Another indirect sign of relationship between Panopticon and Qliktech is the recent inclusion of Måns Hultman, former CEO of QlikTech into the list of advisors for Panopticon’s Board of Directors.

Other questions are rising too: if Qliktech suddenly is open to integration with Panopticon, why not to integrate with Quantrix and R Library (I proposed integration with R a while ago). Similar questions applicable to Tableau Software…

 

Qlikview Prices

Qliktech made its price list public on its website. In a move that calls for “other enterprise software and business intelligence vendors to follow suit, QlikTech is taking the mystery out of purchasing software“.

I expanded this post with comments and comparison of pricing from Qlikview and Tableau.

I have to mention that Tableau has pricing on its website for years. I wish Tableau will publish on its website the pricing for Core License (for Tableau Server) and more detail for Tableau Digital and Server pricing, but other than that, Tableau is a few years ahead of Qliktech in terms of “pricing transparency”… Also talking with Qliktech sales people until today was more time consuming then needed and I hope that public pricing will make it more easy.

One note about Qlikview pricing: Qliktech has a very weird requirement to buy a Document License ($350 per named user, per 1 (ONE) document) for each document is a potential time-bomb for Qlikview. But they are very good at sales  (Total Q4 2011 revenue of $108.1 million increases 33% compared to fourth quarter of 2010, see http://investor.qlikview.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-12-65355&CIK=1305294) and not me, so I will be glad if Qliktech will prove me wrong!

 Again, for now, just review this:

http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/pricing

I tried to compare the cost of average Deployment  for Qlikview-based and Tableau-based Data Visualization Systems using currently Published prices of Qlikview and Tableau (I actually have an estimation for Spotfire-based deployment too, but TIBCO did not published its pricing yet). See prices in table below, and comparison of average deploymnet after/below this table:

I took as average the deployment with 46 users (it is my estimate of average Qlikview Deployment), 3 desktop clients, 10 documents/visualizations available to 10 (potentially different) named users each, 1 Application Server and maintenance for 3 years.

.

My estimate of total cost for 3 years came up as about $118K for Qlikview Deployment and $83K for Tableau Deployment (both before discounts and taxes and both do not include any development, training, consulting and IT cost).

Note 3/8/12: you may wish to review this blog post too:

http://i3community.com/blogs/entry/qlikview-user-license-named-client-access-license-cal

 

16 Data Visualization Vendors are squared

Since Gartner keeps doing its “Magic Quadrant” (MQ; see MQ at the very bottom of this post) for Business Intelligence Platforms every year, it forces me to do my

“Yellow Square for DV, 2012″

for Data Visualization (DV) Platforms too. I did it last year and I have to do it again because I disagreed with Gartner in 2011 and I disagree with it again in 2012. I have a few different (from Gartner) views, but I will mention 3.

1. There is no such thing as Business Intelligence as a software platform. It is a marketing term, used as an umbrella for multiple technologies and market segments. Gartner released its MQ for BI at the same time it had “BI Summit 2012″ in London on which it practically acknowledged that BI is not a correct term and suggested to use the term “Business Analytics” instead, see for example this article: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2012/02/what-i-found-interesting-about-gartner-bi-summit-2012-london.html

2. I personally is using – for many years – the term Data Visualization as a replacement for BI, as much more specific. Because of that, I removed from consideration a few vendors present in Gartner’s MQ for BI and added a few important DV vendors.

3. I used for my assessment 3 groups of criterias, which I already used on this blog before, for example here:

http://apandre.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/dv-comparison-2011/

and here:

http://apandre.wordpress.com/tools/comparison/

As a result, I got a very different from Gartner the placement of “Data Visualization Platforms and their vendors”:

.

For reference purposes please see below the Magic Quadrant for BI, published by Gartner this month. As you can see our lists of Vendors are overlapping by 11 companies, but in my opinion their relative positioning is very different:

 

QLIK: How to lose a Billion Dollars in 6 months

On Friday July 8, 2011, the closing price of Qliktech’s share (symbol QLIK) was $35.43. Yesterday January 6, 2012, QLIK closed with price $23.21. If you consider yesterday’s price as 100% than QLIK (blue line below) lost 52% of value in just 6 months, while Dow Jones (red line below) basically lost only 2-3% :

Since Qliktech’s Market Capitalization as of yesterday evening was about $1.94B, it means that Qliktech lost in last 6 month about 1 billion dollars in capitalization! That is a sad observation to make and made me wonder why it happened?

I see nothing wrong with Qlikview software, in fact everybody knows (and this blog is the prove for it) that I like Qlikview very much.

So I tried to guess for reasons (for that lost) below, but it just my guesses and I will be glad if somebody will prove me mistaken and explain to me the behavior of QLIK stock during last 6 months…

2011 supposed to be the year of Qliktech: it had successful IPO in 2010, it doubled the size of its workforce (I estimate it has more than 1000 employees by end of 2011), it sales grew almost 40% in 2011, it kept updating Qlikview and it generated a lot of interest to it’s products and to Data Visualization market. In fact Qlliktech dominated its market and its marketshare is about 50% (of Data Visualization market).

So I will list below my guesses about factors which influenced QLIK stock and I do not think it was only one or 2 major factors but rather a combination of them (I may guess wrong or miss some possible reasons, please correct me):

1. P/E Ratio (price-to-earnings) for QLIK is 293 (and it was even higher), which may indicate that stock is overvalued and investors expectations are too high.

2. Company insiders (Directors and Officers) were very active lately selling their shares, which may affected the prices of QLIK shares.

3. 56% of Qliktech’s sales are coming from Europe and European market is not growing lately.

4. 58% of Qliktech’s sales are coming from existing customers and it can limit the speed of growth.

5. Most new hires after IPO were sales, pre-sales, marketing and other non-R&D types.

6. Qliktech’s offices are too diversified for its size (PA, MA, Sweden etc.) and what is especially unhealthy (from my view) is that R&D resides mostly in Europe while Headquarters, marketing  and other major departments reside far from R&D  – in USA (mostly in Radnor, PA)

7. 2011 turned to be a year of Tableau (as oppose to my expectation to be a year of Qlikview) and Tableau is winning the battle for mindshare with its Tableau Public web service and its free Desktop Tableau Reader, which allows to distribute Data Visualizations without any Web/Application Servers and IT personnel to be involved. Tableau is growing much faster then Qliktech and it generates a huge momentum, especially in USA, where Tableau’s R&D,QA, Sales, Marketing and Support all co-reside in Seattle, WA.

8. Tableau has the best support for Data Sources; for example, which is important due soon to be released SQL Server 2012, Tableau has the unique ability to read Multidimensional OLAP Cubes from SQL Server Analysis Services and from local Multidimensional Cubes from PowerPivot. Qlikview so far ignored Multidimensional Cubes as data sources and I think it is a mistake.

9. Tableau Software, while it is 3 or 4 times smaller then Qliktech, managed to be able to have more job openings then Qliktech and many of them in R&D, which is a key for a future growth! Tableau’s sales in 2011 reached $72M, workforce is 350+ now (160 of them were hired in 2011!), number of customers is more then 7000 now…

10. I am aware of more and more situations when Qlikview is starting to feel (and sometimes lose) a stiff competition; one of the latest cases documented (free registration may be required) here: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.co.uk/news/2240112678/Irish-Life-chooses-Tableau-data-visualisation-over-QlikView-Oracle and it happened in Europe, where Qlikview suppose to be stronger then competitors. My recent Data Visualization poll also has Tableau as a winner, while Qlikview only on 3rd place so far.

11. In case if you miss it, 2011 was successful for Spotfire too. In Q4 2011 Earnings Call Transcript, TIBCO “saw demand simply explode across” some product areas. According to TIBCO, “Spotfire grew over 50% in license revenue for the year and has doubled in the past two years”. If it is true, that means Spotfire Sales actually approached $100M in 2011.

12. As Neil Charles noted, that Qliktech does not have transparent pricing and “Qlikview’s reps are a nightmare to talk to. They want meetings; they want to know all about your business; they promise free copies of the software. What they absolutely will not do is give you a figure for how much it’s going to cost to deploy the software onto x analysts’ desktops and allow them to publish to a server.” I tend to agree that Qliktech’s pricing policies are pushing many potential customers away from Qlikview toward Tableau where almost all prices known upfront.

I hope I will wake up next morning or next week or next month or next quarter and Qliktech somehow will solve all these problems (may be perceived just by me as problems) and QLIK shares will be priced higher ($40 or above?) than today – at least it is what I wish to my Qliktech friends in new 2012…

Update on 3/2/12 evening: it looks like QLIK shares reading my blog and trying to please me: during last 2 months they regained almost $9 (more then 30%), ending the 3/2/12 session with $29.99 price and regaining more then $550M in market capitalization (qlik on chart to get full-size image of it):

I guess if  QLIK will go in wrong direction again, I have to blog about it, and it will correct itself!

 

Updated Comparison of Data Visualization tools

One of the most popular posts on this blog was a comparison of Data Visualization Tools, which originally was posted more then a year ago where I compared those best tools only qualitatively. However since then I got a lot of requests to compare those tools “quantitatively”. Justification for such update were recent releases of Spotfire 4.0, Qlikview 11, Tableau 7.0 and Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Stack (mostly SQL Server 2012 and PowerPivot V.2.)

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However I quickly realized that such “quantitative” comparison cannot be objective. So here it is – the updated and very subjective comparison of best Data Visualization tools, as I see them at the end of 2011. I know that many people will disagree with my assessment, so if you do not like my personal opinion – please disregard it at “your own peril”. I am not going to prove “numbers” below – they are just my personal assessments of those 4 technologies – I love all 4 of them. Feel free to make your own comparison and if you can share it with me – I will appreciate it very much.

.

Please keep in mind that I reserve the right to modify this comparison overtime if/when I will learn more about all those technologies, their vendors and usage. Criterias used in comparison below listed in 1st column and they are grouped in 3 groups: business, visualization and technical. Columns 2-5 used for my assessments of 4 technologies, last column used for my subjective weights for each criteria and last row of this worksheet has Total for each Data Visualization technology I evaluated.

 

Job openings as a KPI for DV vendors?

Some of visitors to this blog after reading of my recent post about $300K/employee/year as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) suggested to me another Indicator of the health of Data Visualization vendors: a number of job openings and specifically a number and percentage of software development openings (I include software testers and software managers into this category) and use it also as a predictor of the future. Fortunately it is a public data and below is what I got today from respective websites:

• 56(!) positions at Tableau, 14 them of are developers;

• 46 openings at Qliktech, 4 of them are developers;

• 21 positions at Spotfire, 3 of them are developers;

• 3 positions at Visokio, 2 of them are developers.

Considering that Tableau is 4 times less in terms of sales then Qlikview and 3-4 times less (then Qliktech) in terms of workforce, this is an amazing indicator. If Tableau can sustain this speed of growth, we can witness soon the change of Data Visualization landscape, unless Qliktech can find the way to defend its dominant position (50% of DV market).

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For comparison, you can use Microstrategy’s number of openings. While Microstrategy is not a Data Visualization vendor, it is close enough (as BI vendor) for benchmarking purposes: it has 281 openings, 38 of them are developers and current Microstrategy’s workforce is about 3069, basically 3 times more then Qliktech’s workforce…

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In light of recent releases of Qlikview 11 and Spotfire 4.0 it makes (soon to be released) Tableau 7.0 is very interesting to compare… Stay tuned!

 

Breaking $300K barrier with Qlikview 11

I expected Qlikview 11 to be released on 11/11/11 but it was released today to Qliktech partners and customers. Since Qliktech is the public company, it releases regularly a lot of information which is not available (for now) from other DV leaders like Tableau and Visokio and more fuzzy from Spotfire, because Spotfire is just a part of larger successful public corporation TIBCO, which has many other products to worry about.

However I guessed a little and estimated for DV Leaders their 2011 sales and number of employees and got an interesting observation, which is true for a few last years: size of sales per employee (of DV leading vendor) is $300k/Year or less. I included for comparison purposes similar numbers for Apple, Microsoft and Google as well as for Microstrategy, which is a public company, established (22+ years) player in BI market, dedicated to BI and recently to Data Visualization (that is DV, thanks to it Visual Insight product).

Table below included 2 records related to Spotfire: 1 based on 2010 annual report from TIBCO (for TIBCO as whole; I know TIBCO sales for 2011 grew from $754M to $920M but do not know the exact number of TIBCO’s employees for 2011) and other record is my estimates (of a number of employees and sale) for Spotfire division of TIBCO. Update from 1/11/12: For Tableau’s 2011 I used the numbers from John Cook’s article here: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/tableau-software-doubles-sales-2011-hires-160-workers ) :

To me this is an interesting phenomena, because Qliktech thanks to its fast growing sales and recent IPO was able to double it’s sales in last 2 years while … doubling it’s number of employees so it still has its sales hovering around $300K/employee/year, while Software giants Apple, Microsoft and Google are way above this barrier and Microstrategy is 50% below it. I will also guess that Qliktech will try to break this $300K barrier and be closer to Apple/Microsoft/Google in terms of sales per employee.

Thanks to the public nature of Qliktech we know details of its annual Revenue growth and YoY (Year-over-Year) indicators:

and with estimate of 2011 Revenue about $315M, YoY growth (2011 over 2010) will be around 39.4% which is an excellent result, making it difficult (but still possible) for other DV competitors to catch-up with Qliktech. Best chance for this belongs to Tableau Software, who probably will reach the same size of sales in 2011 as Spotfire (my estimate is around $70M-$75M for both), but for last 2 years Tableau has 100% (or more) YoY revenue growth… Qliktech also published the interesting info about major factors for its sales: Europe (56%), Existing Customers (58%), Licenses (61%), Partners(52%):

which means that the increase of sales in Americas, improving New sales (as oppose to sales to existing customer by using “Land and Expand” approach) and improving revenue from Services and Maintenance may help Qliktech to keep the pace. Qliktech has the tremendous advantage over its DV competitors because it has 1200+ partners, who contributed 52% to Qliktech sales (about $136K per partner and I can guess that Qliktech wish to see at least $200K/year contribution from each partner).

Observing the strengths of other DV competitors, I personally think that Qliktech will benefit from the “imitation” of some of their most popular and successful features in order to keep its dominance in Data Visualization market, including:

• free public Qlikview service (with obvious limitations) like free SaaS from Tableau Public and free Spotfire Silver personal edition,

• ability to distribute Data Visualization to desktops without Server by making  available a free desktop Qlikview Reader (similar to free desktop readers from Tableau and Omniscope/Visokio),

• integration with R library (Spotfire and recently Omniscope) to improve analytical power of Qlikview users,

• ability to read multidimensional OLAP Cubes (currently only Tableau can do that), especially Cubes from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services and

• scalability toward Big Data (currently Spotfire’s and Tableau’s data engines can use the disk space as Virtual Memory but Qlikview limited by size of RAM)

This is not a never ending “feature war” but rather a potential ability to say to customers: “why go to competitors, if we have all their features and much more”? Time will tell how DV competition will play out, I expect a very interesting 2012 for Data Visualization market and users and I hope that somebody will able to break $300K/employee/year barrier unless the major M&A will change the composition of DV market. I hope that the DV revolution will continue in new year…

 

Qlikview 11 is anounced (almost 11/11/11)

Qlikview 11

is announced on 10/11/11 – one year after 10/10/10, the release date of Qlikview 10! Qliktech also lunched new demo site with 12 demos of Qlikview 11 Data Visualizations: http://demo11.qlikview.com/ . Real release happened (hopefully) before end of 2011, my personal preference for release date will be 11/11/11 but it may be too much to ask…

QlikView 11 introduces the comparative analysis by enabling the interactive comparison of user-defined groupings. Also now with comparative analysis business users have the power of creating any (own) data (sub)sets and decide which dimensions and values would define the data sets. Users can then view the data sets they have created side by side in a single chart or in different charts:

Collaborative Data Visualization and Discovery.

Also Qlikview 11 enables Collaborative Workspaces – QlikView users can invite others – even those who do not have a license – to participate in live, interactive, shared sessions. All participants in a collaborative session interact with the same analytic app and can see others’ interactions live, see

QlikView users can engage each other in discussions about QlikView content. A user can create notes associated with any QlikView object. Other users can then add their own commentary to create a threaded discussion. Users can capture snapshots of their selections and include them in the discussion so others can get back to the same place in the analysis when reviewing notes and comments. QlikView captures the state of the object (the user’s selections), as well as who made each note and comment and when. Qliktech’s press release is here:

http://www.qlikview.com/us/company/press-room/press-releases/2011/en/1011-qliktech-introduces-social-business-discovery-in-launch-of-qlikview-11

“Our vision for QlikView 11 builds on the fact that decisions aren’t made in isolation, but through social exchanges driven by real-time debate, dialog, and shared insight,” says Anthony Deighton, CTO and senior Vice President, Products at QlikTech. “QlikView 11’s social business discovery approach allows workgroups and teams to collaborate and make decisions faster by collectively exploring data, anywhere, anytime, on any device. Business users are further empowered with new collaborative and mobile capabilities, and IT managers will appreciate the unified management functionality that allows them to keep control and governance at the core while pushing usage out to the edges of the organization.”

New Features in Qlikview 11

Qlikview now is integrated (I think it is a big deal) with TFS – source control system from Microsoft. This makes me think that may be Donald Farmer (he left Microsoft in January 2011 and joined Qliktech) has an additional assignment to make it possible for Microsoft to buy Qliktech? [Dear Donald - please be careful: Microsoft already ruined ProClarity and some others after buying them]. Free QlikView 11 Personal Edition will be available for free download by the end of year at www.qlikview.com/download.

Also if you will check Demo “What is new in Qlikview 11″ here:
http://us.demo11.qlikview.com/QvAJAXZfc/opendoc.htm?document=Whats%20New%20in%20QlikView11.qvw&host=demo11&anonymous=true , you can find the following new features:

• mentioned above Comparative Analysis
• Collaborative Data Visualization
• integration with TFS
• granular chart dimension control.
• Conditional Enabling (dynamic add/remove) dimensions and/or expressions/metrics
• Grid Container to show multiple objects, including another containers
• Metadata for Charts: annotations, tips, labels/keywords, comments, mouse-over pop-up labels
• some new actions (including Clear Field)

 

Data Visualization Poll (Fall 2011)

7 months ago I published a poll on LinkedIn and got a lot of responses, 1340 votes (in average 1 vote per hour) and comments. People asked me many times to repeat this poll from time to time. I guess it is time to re-Poll. I added 2 more choices (LinkedIn allows maximum 5 choices in their polls and it is clear not enough for this poll), based on a feedback I got: Omniscope and Visual Insight/Microstrategy. I also got some angry voters complaining that certain vendors are funding this poll. This is completely FALSE, I am unaffiliated with any of vendors, mentioned in this poll and I am working for completely independent (from those vendors) software company, see the About page of this Blog.