Company: Qlik Technologies, Radnor, Pennsylvania
Entry Submitted By: Weber Shandwick
Company Description: Qlik is a leader in data discovery delivering intuitive solutions for self-service data visualization and guided analytics. The company offers two products – Qlik Sense and QlikView. Approximately 33,000 customers rely on these solutions to gain meaning out of information from varied sources, exploring the hidden relationships within data that lead to insights that ignite good ideas.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Software
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Business or Competitive Intelligence Solution

Nomination Title: Qlik Sense

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

Imagine a world where every employee, from any device, can rapidly create visually rich analytics to explore theories, prove hypothesis, or discover new trends that can change the trajectory of their business.

This was the vision that drove Qlik® to create Qlik® Sense, the first device-independent, self-service visualization and discovery product engineered for enterprise-class governance and performance. Just as Qlik disrupted the business intelligence industry to pioneer the data discovery category with its flagship QlikView® product, the company is now leading the next transformation as the market matures and moves to governed, user-driven creation.

Qlik Sense gives users the unrestricted ability to create personalized data analyses and explore the relationships that exist in data to reveal connections instantly. The product is designed to serve audiences equally without compromise: business users gain the intuitive experience they need, developers gain boundless possibilities for what they can create and IT gains centralized control for management and governance.

Qlik Sense is built to help organizations capitalize on data-driven decision making. Its storytelling feature allows users to capture and share their insights in presentation format to create a compelling narrative of their findings. Users can add commentary and narrative as well as pictures to best communicate their results and convince team members and executives to take action. At any time during the presentation, they have the option to dive directly into the data to answer questions on the fly and can then go back to the presentation with just the click of a button. This helps to drive communication of insight and facilitates group discovery.

Qlik Sense is built on the QIX Associative Data Indexing engine, the second generation of Qlik’s proven and patented engine technology. Associative Data Indexing allows people to explore data relationships across many sources that would otherwise be hidden in hierarchical or query-based approaches.

Other key capabilities of the platform include intuitive smart search where users can type in keywords to search for points within the data, enhanced visualization offerings, a responsive user experience, drag-and-drop design, enterprise-class governance and performance and more.

Qlik also offers a free desktop version of Sense for personal and business use. It includes all the user experience, exploration, data visualization, drag-and-drop development, and storytelling capabilities of Qlik Sense in a standalone, installed Windows client. It allows for the assembly and navigation of visualization applications that can be saved as local files to share with other users. In the free version there is no limit on the number of applications that can be created or restrictions on file sharing.

Compared to competitors in the industry, Qlik Sense is providing a whole new experience for customers. Unlike other products on the market, including Qlik Sense does not require a “build-and-publish” approach since every user is fully empowered to leverage simple drag-and-drop techniques to build or extend their visual analysis, all while ensuring centralized data security and governance.

While competitive products can answer questions that are well formed in advance, Qlik Sense guides users to ask and answer streams of questions in a fluid and dynamic way. Qlik Sense drives faster time to insight with intuitive exploration, smart search, and smart visualizations. It broadens knowledge sharing with data storytelling and mobility. And, it promotes accuracy and reliability through enterprise governance capabilities.

The September launch of Qlik Sense has already resulted in several seven-figure deals across the globe. Existing and new customers alike are choosing Qlik Sense to take data intelligence away from the IT department and place it in the hands of the business users who need it. Users so far have been impressed with the new capabilities of Qlik Sense, noting its simplicity and flexibility as key differentiators against similar products on the market today.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and benefits of the nominated product or service.

Smart search: Users type in keywords to uncover data relationships and information in visualizations and locations that might otherwise be unnoticed.

Smart visualizations: Feature advanced summarization of information, intelligent use of color gradients, and responsive design that adapts information based on screen size.

Responsive user experience: Built for mobile from the ground up. Adapts visualizations, data, and functionality for the best experience on any device – including touch.

Robust data integration: Combines multiple, disparate data sources and provides seamless analysis across them, including associative exploration, and search.

Enterprise-class governance: Provides governed, centralized libraries for data and visualizations, rules based security, and powerful management tools.

Data Storytelling: Presents guided stories, rich with narrative and graphics, to communicate insights and facilitate discussion.

Open and standard APIs for building rich analytic apps, embedding visualizations into existing solutions, and extending the functionality of Qlik Sense for new types of visualizations and objects.