Qlik

Qlik [pronounced "klik"] (formerly known as Qliktech) provides an end-to-end platform which includes data integration, user-driven business intelligence and conversational analytics. The software company was founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden and is now based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, United States. The company's main products are QlikView and Qlik Sense, both software for business intelligence and data visualization.

History
The company was founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993, by the late Bjorn Berg and Staffan Gestrelius. Its Swedish headquarters are still in Lund. The company’s first product, QuikView (now called QlikView), was built to enable users to retrieve detailed data analysis from various systems. In 1993, Måns Hultman became CEO in 2000 and Lars Björk became CFO.

The first version of the product came out in 1994, and a patent application was made in 1995. QUIK, in the original name of the product, stood for Quality, Understanding, Interaction, and Knowledge.

QlikView 2 came out in 1996 and QlikView 3 in 1997, and QlikView 4 in 1999.I

In 1998, the company received funding from Swedish investors Handelsbanken and Industrifonden

The company focused on the area of business intelligence (BI), growing from 35 employees in 1999 to 70 in 2003. In 2004, the firm decided to expand internationally and moved the company headquarters to the U.S., while development stayed in Lund. That year, it secured $12.5 million in venture capital funding from equity firms Accel Partners and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).

QlikView 7 was released in 2005 and the single-user desktop tool was replaced with a server-based web tool., and in 2006, the company had $44 million in revenue.

In 2007, Lars Björk became CEO.

Recent history
As of April 2011, the company had a market capitalization over $2 billion. In 2012, Forbes listed it as one of America’s top three fastest-growing tech companies.

In 2013, the company opened an office in Perth, Australia, due to its large consumer base in that country. In August 2015, the company expanded its R&D operations by opening an office in Ottawa, Ontario.

Qlik acquired Vizubi and its Nprinting product in 2015 as well.

In 2016, private equity firms Bain Capital, Permira, and Thoma Bravo submitted offers to buy Qlik. In June, the firm announced that it agreed to sell itself to Thoma Bravo for about $3 billion. In 2017, CEO Lars Bjork transitioned his responsibilities to David Murphy as interim CEO; Mike Capone was named CEO in January 2018.

In 2017, Qlik started working with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health. The two worked together to use data to identify situations where healthcare officials could prescribe fewer opioids, helping to combat the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.

In 2018, the firm was named Gartner’s Customers’ Choice for Best Business Intelligence and Analytics Software.

Idevio (Geo Analytics) was acquired in 2017, and Podium Data in 2018. Qlik had partnered with Crunch Data for 4 years prior to the acquisition.

In 2019, the company made it possible for customers to deploy its software on Qlik Cloud Services, Qlik’s Software-as-a-Service environment. The software was also made available to be deployed on any public cloud under a single license.

In 2020, the company acquired Knarr Analytic for its real-time collaboration and insight capture capabilities.

Products
Qlik’s Associative Engine lets users do big data analytics, combining a number of data sources so that associations and connections can be formed across the data. The two main products QlikView and Qlik Sense serve different purposes running on the same engine. In QlikView, the user is pursuing their day-to-day tasks, analyzing data with a slightly configurable dashboard, most of the data is static. Qlik Sense allows concatenation of different data sources and fully configuring the visualizations, allowing drill-down on an individual data record.

Qlik Analytics Platform offers direct access to Qlik’s Associative data engine through open and standard APIs. Qlik Data Catalyst is an enterprise data management product. and Qlik Core is an analytics development platform built around Qlik’s Associative engine and company-authored open source libraries.

As add-on products, Qlik GeoAnalytics provides mapping capabilities and built-in support for geoanalytic use cases, Qlik DataMarket provides access to a cloud-based service with a variety of external data content that can be used to cross-reference and augment users’ data, and Qlik Connectors are tools that allow QlikView and Qlik Sense to interact with external data sources not accessible through normal ODBC or OLE-DB data connections

Data literacy project
Qlik launched the Data Literacy Project in October 2018 with the help of founding partners Accenture, Cognizant, Experian, Pluralsight, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and Data to the People, with the goal of fighting data illiteracy on a global scale.

In May 2019, the firm developed a certification that allowed individuals to document and demonstrate data literacy skills, and the certification was introduced and made available on the Data Literacy Project.