Taro's Blog

Qlik, or QlikTech back then, became the powerhouse in the Business Intelligence (BI) space in the early 2010s. Their flagship product was QlikView. The company was headquartered in Lund, Sweden. In 2000, Lars Björk became CFO. In 2007, Lars become CEO and the golden age of the company began.

In 2005, Anthony Deighton, former Siebel CRM Product Manager, joined as VP of Products and later became CTO. In 2011, Donald Farmer, former Microsoft Product Manager on SQL Server, joined as VP of Product Management and later became VP of Innovation and Design (evangelist).

The threesome of Lars, Anthony, and Donald made QlikView a shining star in the late 2000s/early 2010s from a marketing and sales perspective, in my opinion.

From a technical viewpoint, QlikView was a Windows standalone (aka Desktop) software to start with. Later, they developed the server product for Windows workstations and expanded it to a server-client architecture. At the same time, the server components seamlessly work with IIS, so that the published contents can be shared in a private network or on the Internet. At Qlik, I worshiped Henric (HIC) Cronström as my technical guru. (HIC’s Blogs in the Qlik Community.) My bible was “QlikView 11 for Developers“.

From a marketing viewpoint, QlikView created its mystified brand with these pitches: Associative Engine, Power of Gray, In-memory Processing. Personally, I liked the ETL (Extract, transform, load) component of QlikView, but I did not buy those pitches.

In 2015, the top seat in the BI space was taken over by Tableau Software. Their next generation of the product, Qlik Sense (aka “Tableau Killer”), did not kill Tableau. Instead, it backfired. In 2016, Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, purchased Qlik and privatized the company. The magnificent three of Lars, Anthony, and Donald were all axed.

Qlik could have been better off if they sold more licenses in Japan. Then, why did they not sell well in Japan? I had an observation. QlikTech Japan KK made a bad retail deal with 株式会社アシスト (KK Ashisuto). QlikTech Japan KK somehow granted the master retailer status to that SME, KK Ashisuto. I was shocked to see many major retailers under the SME. I saw many sales reps with broken hearts because of that. In addition, Ashisuto sells 2 brands (WebFOCUS and Qlik) of the Business Intelligence (BI) solution, but they always present WebFOCUS as their primary option and Qlik as the alternative. Who did screw up? Some said that it was the first Country Manager of QlikTech Japan KK, who left in 2013, but I was not sure.