2020 was quite a year of innovation for Qlik analytics. We delivered key new augmented analytics capabilities with big updates to Insight Advisor, we integrated intelligent alerts fully into Qlik Sense in less than a year, we continued to expand our visualization capabilities to make it easier to showcase your data in exciting and compelling ways, and we made it even easier to execute analytics in the cloud.
Here’s key highlights from a banner year.
Customers are rapidly moving to the cloud, and COVID-19 only accelerated the pace of that adoption curve. This year, we delivered both capabilities and programs to help customers more seamlessly adopt the cloud for analytics to match their pace and needs. In April, we launched new packaging and adoption programs, including new packaging of Qlik Sense Enterprise with SaaS only and Client-Managed options, plus a direct path for QlikView customers to adopt Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS with the ability to host their QlikView documents in the cloud.
Throughout the year, we continued to add elements that help all our customers continue the journey to SaaS and the cloud, including doubling the standard data limit and removing limits on file size and reloads and the ability to host QlikView apps in Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS. We were also pleased to achieve ISO27001 and SOC II Type 2 and 3, as third-party validation of the trust and confidence we already have from our customers.
Continued Industry Leadership in Augmented Analytics
Throughout the year, we continued to add to our leading portfolio of augmented analytics capabilities that are natively build into Qlik Sense. Early in the year, we added support for multiple languages and business logic to make insights more relevant and applicable to a wider audience of analytics users across customer organizations.
Our September release saw a significant set of enhancements to Insight Advisor. We built a conversational analytics experience – Insight Advisor Chat – into Qlik Sense; added a new business logic layer for customization of insight generation; natural language processing; and, introduced on-board advanced analytics calculation to complement our real-time integration capabilities.
From our initial January acquisition of RoxAI, we managed a very rapid rollout of alerting capabilities into the overall product set. In May 2020, we launched Qlik Alerting as a value-added product for our Windows customers, and, in the fall, we fully integrated and included Data Alerts for our SaaS customers. Sophisticated, data-driven alerts directly from Qlik Sense empower our customers to proactively manage by exception and respond quickly when issues arise. Its advanced data-driven features, including statistical calculation and trending, help customers spot outliers and anomalies.
We made big strides in making it easier to leverage AI-driven cloud analytics by improving the migration path of data to Qlik Sense SaaS with the debut of Qlik DataTransfer™. Qlik DataTransfer is a lightweight, easy-to-use utility, built directly into Qlik Sense, that helps organizations more easily and securely migrate their on-premise and local data to the cloud. Qlik DataTransfer leverages the full ability of Qlik Sense to combine and transform data, ensuring that data arrives in cloud analytics ready and kept up to date within Qlik Sense SaaS applications.
We also continued to increase the number of connectors to new data sources, a total of 21 through all of 2020, to help expand the ability of analytics to bring more value to even more of an enterprise’s relevant data.
This year we accelerated the pace at which we’re bringing world-class visualization capabilities to Qlik Sense. We maintained the breakneck pace from 2019, adding over 50 new visualization and dashboarding enhancements in 2020. Today, we have a broad library of best-in-class visuals – beautiful, intelligent, interactive and responsive, driven by the power of our associative engine to manage context and calculate analytics at the speed of thought. Check out the Visualization Showcase, which is updated regularly.
A Year of Industry Accolades
Our long-standing position as a leader and innovator in analytics and BI continued to be recognized by the industry throughout 2020. For the 10th year in a row, Gartner recognized Qlik as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence platforms. Our continued leadership strongly reflects the innovation and value customers are realizing with Qlik as we help customers now move their analytics efforts to the cloud.
Another significant set of kudos came in the form of BARC’s annual BI and Analytics Survey 21, where Qlik Sense earned a huge number of accolades – 11 number-one rankings and 44 leadership positions in four peer groups in a survey of over 2,500 BI and analytics practitioners! We were Top Ranked in eight categories for Large international BI vendors; Top Ranked in two categories for Self-service analytics-focused products; and Top Ranked in competitiveness for Embedded analytics-focused products.
As you can tell, 2020 was a major year for our analytics platform, with continued innovation within our products and an emphasis on partnership expansion forming key pillars of our growth and advancement strategy. In the coming year, we will remain equally committed to releasing exciting new capabilities and enriching existing ones to delight our customers.