A Revolution in Benefits

The QlikView solution, because of its unique integrated components and because it operates entirely in memory, offers some unique advantages over traditional OLAP:

Fast Time-to-Value: With traditional OLAP, constructing cubes is time consuming and requires expert skills. This process can take months, and sometimes over a year. In addition, the cube must be constructed before it can be calculated, a process which itself can take hours. And, all this must occur before analysis or reporting can be performed – before the user even sees answers to his questions. Because the data is loaded in memory, creating analysis in QlikView takes seconds. There is no pre-definition of what is a dimension – any data is available as a dimension and any data is available as a measure. The time implementing QlikView is spent locating data, and deciding what analysis is interesting or relevant to solving the business question. Typically, this process takes only a week or two.

Easy to Use: The entire end user experience in QlikView is driven by the “click.” End users enjoy using QlikView because it works the way their mind does. Each time they want to review the data sliced a new way, they simply click on the data they want to evaluate. Because QlikView operates in memory, with each click all data and measures are recalculated to reflect the selection. Users can go from high level aggregates (e.g., roll up of margin on all products in a specific line) to individual records (e.g., which order was that?) in a click – without pre-defining the path to the individual record. The QlikView UI uses color coding which provides instant feedback to queries.

Powerful: Because queries and calculations are performed in memory, they are extremely quick. In addition, QlikView is not constrained by the speed of the underlying source. Even if the underlying data is stored in a system which has poor query performance (for instance, a text file), the performance is always optimal because the data is loaded in memory.
QlikView also compresses data as it is stored in memory, allowing large amounts of data to be stored. Typically, there is a 10X reduction in size of the data once it’s in memory.

Flexible: One of the major issues with traditional OLAP is that modifying an analysis requires changing the cube, a process which can take a very long time. In addition, this process is typically controlled by IT. With QlikView, viewing analysis by a new dimension or changing a measure can be performed by business professionals in seconds. Standard interfaces, including ODBC and Web Services, mean that any data source can be analyzed in QlikView. What’s more, users can do “local” or “desktop” analysis, using the full data and interactivity of the application on laptops

Scalable: QlikView is designed to scale easily in both the amount of data it can handle, and the number of users working with it. It’s simple to deploy to thousands of users – utilizing all available hardware power across all available processors and cores, requiring only a web browser.

QlikView has over 220,000 users at more than 4,800 customers in 65 countries, and adds more than 10 new customers each working day ( as of October 2006). In addition to hundreds of small and midsized companies. QlikTech’s customers included large corporations such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Top Flite, 3M, and The Campell Soup Company,
Atlas Copco, Tesa Tape, The Zurich Insurance Co, WH Smith Direct, etc.