The Reality Behind Hybrid vs. Pure-Play

Open source’s initial promise still rings true; to liberate corporate IT from costly lock in relationships with major software vendors. What’s changed today is that most IT leaders want a hybrid approach that reaps the benefits of open source tools while also leveraging proprietary applications to accelerate development and integrate best-practice IP into new applications.

Qlik’s product strategy and vision match this demand for hybrid open source and best practice proprietary solutions. Qlik Data Catalyst (formerly the Podium Data Marketplace) combines open source, and now cloud infrastructure, with a rich application layer to manage and expose a well governed catalog and collection of analytics-ready data to the business.

Time and again, Qlik’s customers cite the importance of this application layer in making the underlying open source platform useful and trustworthy in their large, complex and intensely governed IT landscapes. Far from objecting to Qlik’s focus on building propriety solutions, these customers hold high value to the expertise, acceleration, and reliability Qlik’s solutions add into what would otherwise be risky, immature, and functionally-incomplete open source tools.

Having shackled themselves to a purest open-source-only position throughout their ascent (and now the demise), the error in Hortonwork’s decision has now revealed itself with Cloudera’s triumph. But the real message here isn’t Cloudera vs. Hortonworks. But rather hybrid vs. pure-play. And happily, Qlik’s been on the right side of that equation for some time now.