data integration
Data integration refers to the process of combining, sharing, or synchronizing data from multiple sources to provide users with a unified view.
There are a wide range of possible applications for data integration, from commercial (such as when a ...
, analytics, and
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
platform. The
software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
company was founded in 1993 in
Lund, Sweden
Lund (, ;"Lund" (US) and ) is a city in the
and is now based in
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
King of Prussia (nicknamed K.O.P.) is a census-designated place in Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania, Upper Merion Township in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States. The community took its unusual name in the 18th century from a loca ...
,
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
. Thoma Bravo made the company private in 2016.
Qlik Data Integration (QDI) includes tools such as ''Qlik Replicate'' for data replication, ''Qlik Catalog'' for data organization, ''Qlik Compose'' for automation of data lakes and data warehouses, and ''Qlik Talend Cloud'' for maintenance of data integrity. Qlik's AI program enables AI-powered analytics, natural language capabilities, and visualizations. ''Qlik Answers'' generates answers to questions from unstructured data sources. It also includes AutoML for no-code development of predictive models and tools for low-latency data processing.
History
The company was founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993, by Björn 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. 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, QlikView 3 in 1997, and QlikView 4 in 1999. In 1998, the company received funding from Swedish investors
Handelsbanken
Svenska Handelsbanken AB is a leading Nordic countries, Nordic bank with international operations, providing a comprehensive range of financial services including corporate banking, investment banking, trading, and consumer banking such as loans, ...
and Industrifonden
The company focused on the area of business intelligence, 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
Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is a global venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ope ...
and
Jerusalem Venture Partners
Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) is an international Venture capital in Israel, venture capital firm founded in 1993. The fund specializes in investments in Startup company, startup companies, focusing on digital media, enterprise software, semic ...
.
QlikView 7 was released in 2005, and the single-user desktop tool was replaced with a server-based web tool. In 2006, the company had $44 million in revenue.
In 2007, Lars Björk became CEO.
As of April 2011, the company had a
market capitalization
Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders.
Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by ...
over $2 billion. In 2012,
Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...
listed it as one of America's top three fastest-growing tech companies.
In 2012, Qlik acquired Expressor Software for metadata management.
In 2013, the company opened an office in
Perth, Australia
Perth () is the capital city of Western Australia. It is the fourth-most-populous city in Australia, with a population of over 2.3 million within Greater Perth . The world's most isolated major city by certain criteria, Perth is part of the ...
, due to its large consumer base in that country. In August 2015, the company expanded its research and development operations by opening an office in
Ottawa, Ontario
Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It is located in the southern Ontario, southern portion of the province of Ontario, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the cor ...
.
In 2015 Qlik acquired Vizubi and its NPrinting product.
In 2016, private equity firms
Bain Capital
Bain Capital, LP is an American Investment company, private investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts, with around $185 billion of assets under management. It specializes in private equity, venture capital, credit, p ...
,
Permira
Permira Holdings Limited is a British global investment firm specialised in buyouts, growth funds, equity funds, and credit funds. Founded in 1985 as part of Schroders, it became independent in 1996. Operating as Permira since 2001, the company ...
, and
Thoma Bravo
Thoma Bravo, LP is an American private equity and growth capital firm based in Chicago, Illinois. It is known for being particularly active in acquiring enterprise software companies and has over $130billion in assets under management .
It ...
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
Thomas Jefferson University is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Established in its earliest form in 1824, the university officially combined with Philadelphia University in 2017. ...
and
Jefferson Health
Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, Inc, branded as Jefferson Health, is a multi-state non-profit health system whose flagship hospital is Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Center City Philadelphia. The health system's hospitals serve ...
. 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 2017 Idevio (Geo Analytics) was acquired by Qlik, and data catalog company Podium Data in 2018. In 2019, the company acquired an AI, natural language bot company, Crunch Data, who it had partnered with for 4 years prior to the acquisition. Crunch Data was integrated into its Insight Advisor product.
In 2019, the company acquired data integration company Attunity for $560M which expanded its footprint in the Boston area.
In 2020, the company acquired Knarr Analytic for its real-time collaboration and insight capture capabilities. The same year, the company acquired RoxAI for its Ping Alerting and intelligent automation software, and Blendr.io for its data integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) to allow for data integration and automation to hundreds of SaaS-based business applications.
Qlik was used by the
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals (WWL) NHS Foundation Trust is an NHS Foundation Trust providing services in the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and Wrightington, England. It was formed on 1 April 2001 by the merger of Wrightingto ...
NHS patient data during the
COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom
The COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom is a part of the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In the United Kingdom, it has resulted in confirm ...
.
In 2021, the company introduced Qlik Application Automation, which automates tasks and data workflows between Qlik Cloud and SaaS applications. The same year, the company acquired Salt Lake City-based Big Squid, a leading provider of no-code automated machine learning. The company also went on to acquire NodeGraph, a customizable metadata management solution, to help expand its analytics data pipeline capabilities.
In 2022, Qlik confidentially filed papers for
IPO
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
with the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Its primary purpose is to enforce laws against market m ...
to go public.
In 2023, Qlik acquired Talend combining its data integration solutions with Talend’s data transformation, quality, and governance Capabilities.
In December 2023, Qlik acquired Mozaic Data, which introduced a Data Product Catalog to streamline data management.
In January 2024, Qlik acquired Kyndi, which focused on natural language processing and generative AI to ameliorate the processing of unstructured data.
Products
Qlik's Associative Engine lets users do
big data
Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...
analytics, combining a number of data sources so that associations and connections can be formed across the data. The two main data analytics products, Qlik Sense (current cloud-based software) and QlikView (legacy on-premise product), serve different purposes running on the same engine. QlikView for analyzing static data, while Qlik Sense allows
concatenation
In formal language theory and computer programming, string concatenation is the operation of joining character strings end-to-end. For example, the concatenation of "snow" and "ball" is "snowball". In certain formalizations of concatenati ...
of different data sources, allowing drill-down on an individual data record.
The Qlik Data Analytics Platform (QDA) offers direct access to Qlik's Associative data engine through open and standard APIs. Qlik Data Catalyst is an enterprise data catalog management product, and Qlik Core is an analytics development platform built around Qlik's Associative engine and company-authored open source libraries.
The Qlik Branch platform and open APIs allow third-party developers to create add-ons that extend Qlik Sense's visualization capabilities. Some of the Qlik Sense extension producers include ancoreSoft, AnyChart, Applybi, ExtendBI, Inphinity, TrueChart, and Vizlib.
As in-house 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
In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. An ...
or OLE-DB data connections
The Qlik Data Integration platform, (QDI) includes Qlik Replicate for data replication and real-time data ingestion, Qlik Catalog for organizing data, and Qlik Compose for data lakes and data warehouse automation. Qlik Talend Cloud introduces AI augmented data integration and quality capabilities.
Qlik Answers generates answers to questions from unstructured data sources.
Finances
On June 2, 2016, private equity firm Thoma Bravo announced that it would acquire Qlik in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $3 billion. The acquisition was completed in August 2016. Thoma Bravo paid $30.50 per share for Qlik, representing a 40% percent premium to the Company's unaffected 10 day average stock price prior to March 3, 2016 of $21.83.
In January 2022, '' ZDNET'' reported that Qlik had confidentially filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to go public again.
See also
*
Data integration
Data integration refers to the process of combining, sharing, or synchronizing data from multiple sources to provide users with a unified view.
There are a wide range of possible applications for data integration, from commercial (such as when a ...