Data is crucial for business growth, but due to the strenuous nature of data science practices, firms struggle to make the most out of the information they collect. Since analysing and finding insights requires experts, only data scientists are able to deliver value by leveraging data. But for a business to thrive in this cut-throat competition, companies need to democratise data among every employee to enable self-analytics. 

To facilitate employees to analyse data easily, organisations are leveraging business intelligence tools and AutoML. While the former is allowing employees to mould and evaluate data dynamically, the latter is helping in automating ML model selection to get an accurate prediction.

To understand how Qlik is helping several companies who are hungry to figure out the most effective ways of using data, Analytics India Magazine interviewed Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik, for our weekly column Deep Dive.  

Capone’s Journey At Qlik 

Qlik is an end-to-end platform for data analytics that empowers organisations to obtain insights into their data for mitigation business challenges. Founded in 1993, the Sweden-based company has helped firms gain operational resilience by utilising data and stay competitive in the market.

The company hired Capone in 2018 to help Qlik to continue its endeavours and stay ahead of its competitors, mainly PowerBI and Tableau. “I started my career as a programmer and worked my way up and eventually became a CIO of a 12-billion-dollar company. Later, I was recruited to be the CEO of Qlik, and it was super attractive for me because as I have been on both sides to understand customers and development procedures,” says Capone.

Over the last two years, he has spent building the team by fine-tuning the strategy and expanding Qlik from just a visual analytics firm to data integration and machine learning platform. 

Trends In The Business Intelligence Landscape

On a trip to India and other Asian countries, Capone while meeting with CIO’s of various companies learned how they are using analytics in their company. He also figured out what are firms challenges with regards to becoming a full-fledged data-driven business. While talking to us, he mentioned that different companies are arduously trying to analyse data at the edge. 

“What’s great about Asia Pacific and India, in particular, is that companies in your country are ahead in terms of embracing analytics and data, there’s a high degree of data literacy in India and companies are willing to experiment, and push the envelope in terms of trying new technologies by leveraging modern AI capabilities to improve their operations,” Capone explained.

How Is Qlik Helping Organisations With Streaming Analytics

Over the past 15 months, Qlik has acquired firms to build a data integration platform. The company has bought technologies to enable real-time analytics. Capone stressed on the need of getting rid of data lakes through streaming analytics. He said how recent advancements in the platform would enable companies to perform analytics in real-time for unveiling insights into data. For this, they also offer API and other toolsets to assist numerous firms in accomplishing their objectives.

“With our platform, organisations can harness the power of data with AI techniques to gain meaningful insights. Companies like HDFC are using our platform to determine fraudulent insurance claims,” says Capone.

AI In Qlik Platform

Capone said, today, data scientists analyse data to find some interesting things and draw some patterns. But, how do you embed that back into the operation of the business? Consider a firm with 30,000 or 100,000 people, how do a few data scientists can help a colossal number of employees. He further added that their platform uses machine learning so that even a non-expert can embrace the Qlik product set and bring analytics right to the end-users. 

The CEO boasts about embedding bot that let’s end users interact with the data and analytics through natural language. One can type in questions in a language to get results back. 

“The AI that’s built into our platform eliminates the need for coding, it’s our own technology embedded in the platform,” explains the CEO. “It will automatically interpret customers data sets and provides logs for assimilating the outcomes, thereby, we call it a white box. Besides, our API can be used to carry out sophisticated tasks by writing Python codes,” adds Capone.

Further, when asked about the capability of Qlik in comparison to what one can get with coding, Capone said it’s a difficult question and depends on the type of problem developer is trying to solve. However, he went on to claim that most of the basic data science questions can be easily answered. If one is trying to look at multivariate regression, then they will have to use programming languages.  

How Qlik Differentiate in Fierce Competition

Business intelligence was already crowded with multiple providers such as Tableau and PowerBI, but now as cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, are trying to have their footprints in the landscape as well. “I have a lot of respect for our competitors, but we do much more than what they offer,” mentions the CEO.

He then described how a few companies are focused only on desktop visualisations, and Qlik goes a step forward and solves large problems by helping them scale. For this, they used proprietary patented technology, which doesn’t use SQL. Developers can bring data together from different data sources without having to worry about the data structure and SQL-based queries. Besides, he said that Qlik does not look to pull customers data, store and analyse it for the firm’s benefit, thereby, providing peace of mind to customers with data privacy concerns.

Further, the CEO said that Qlik is a fully integrated platform, which allows firms to use it with any other solutions and platforms. Such functionality enables flexibility for companies, resulting in enhanced efficiency and productivity. “I don’t think any other BI providers can do what we are offering,” claims Capone.

What’s Ahead

“Our next iteration is to improve the platform further to help our customers run more complex tasks that use AI. The idea is to deliver an end-to-end solution for carrying out data science workflows,” unveils Capone. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market for Qlik as it is gaining customers. 

“I always say that you cannot be a successful technology company unless you are successful in India.”

The company envision high revenue from Asia; thus, it is doubling down its resources to help its customers achieve business growth. “I expect APAC to outpace the rest of the world in terms of growth for us for the foreseeable future,” concludes Capone.

The post You Aren’t Considered Successful Until You Make It In India: Mike Capone, Qlik appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.