QlikView Reviews

Data Discovery has allowed us to enrich the analysis of data and discover new ways to generate new KPIs. It has also helped us to discover some critical points in our processes.

Using QlikView models, we've improved after-sales service in several of the products we offer, and we have managed to measure the profitability of our customers.

There’s room for improvement with the licensing, as well as memory consumption for certain objects and technical support.

I have used this solution for three years.

I have encountered issues with scalability. We have generated models with large amounts of data and have found that the processor and memory of our server has been declining. We do not have something to help us to size the equipment requirements when a big data model is developed in QlikView.

Technical support is good, but needs to be better for our local service.

We are evaluating Power BI suite and Datazen. We found that these products offer a good level of analysis, but the licensing offer was the deciding factor.

A vendor team did the implementation.

We still do not see a significant ROI.

Make an accurate sizing analysis of information, with a view to growth.

The ability to provide drill down functionality quickly and easily into large data sets. Anyone working with a large amount of data in Microsoft Excel and then waiting ages for it to subtotal all that information, will certainly appreciate the speed and efficiency with which QlikView handles data. Users can get a lot more done, and a lot more data can be analysed in a shorter period of time.

The fact that QlikView provides its own QVD structure, as well, removes all dependency on having a DBMS in place before implementing QlikView – so it is cost effective.

The fact that QlikView can literally plug in to so many different types of data sources, as well, is a definite benefit.

The facility to auto-reload at scheduled times is great too!

My company was recently bought out by a competitor, now forming one group. The organisations are on different versions of a particular ERP solution, and the need immediately arose, from a regional and management executive level, for a dashboard to measure the sales performance of the group as a whole. Using QlikView, we managed to pull information from two different servers - one running off a QVD file structure, the other using a Microsoft SQL Server - and provide a consolidated sales performance model. This allows our executives to be able to examine the performance of their companies from a central point.

Some improvement to the user interface (for the developers). It could certainly use a re-vamp. The existing tab structure can be confusing sometimes and the controls that you would expect to find on one particular tab are actually on another.

I'm referring to the properties of the various charts that you can create within Qlikview – this brings up a dialogue box with a number of different tabs along the top;

In my opinion, for example, the tabs “Visual Cues” and “Style” could be combined into one. “Caption” for another example could be renamed to “Title Bar config” or “Chart Config” or something like that. Some aspects of the “Layout” tab could be added to “Presentation”.

The dialogue box itself isn’t quite wide enough, so if you end up going all the way to the right you have to click on an arrow a couple of times to see the tabs all the way to the left again, and you can’t resize it either – Why???. The box itself should be wide enough to encompass the number of tabs in a single view. Either that, or have a maximise / minimise buttons on it to give the users the choice.

There are no doubt a few others I can point out if I give more though to it, just my feeling of the product is that it can be a little unwieldy, especially to people initially learning the program.

The company has had the solution for the last five years, I have been involved for the last two.

No issues encountered, the solution is stable, and the users are happy with the solutions provided.

Customer service and support from QlikView South Africa is first rate. They respond quickly, and are always friendly, professional and very efficient.

QlikView was this company’s first foray into making use of an external business intelligence tool.

The setup is fairly simple, but you do have to have a decent level of technical knowledge if you are going to set up a Qlikview Server yourself. Otherwise, I’d suggest the use of a consultant. The client software is very simple to set up.

We implemented through a vendor. The advice I would have is to ensure that you attend all necessary QlikView courses (i.e. designer / developer), to get a very clear idea for yourself exactly how QlikView works. Sometimes sales consultants will over-sell you on the bells and whistles of a product, and when you actually want to make use of it in a particular way, you might not be able to. This has not been the case during our QlikView implementation, but I have experienced other implementations that have been like this.

So you do need to be very clear on:

• What exactly do you want to get out of a business intelligence solution, what data do you want to manipulate and analyse, etc.
• For your own sanity, be very clear on how QlikView works and that you will get the solutions out of it that you want.

One cannot really place a monetary value on the depth of very valuable information that QlikView can help you extract. My advice also would be to be very clear on the licensing model you want to go for. The QlikView licensing model is complicated, so be sure that whoever is selling QlikView to you explains it thoroughly.

I would suggest having someone in-house doing the development of your models for you, be it dedicated to that role or in addition to another duty. Nobody understands your business quite like you or the people working for you, and that is always advantageous when building solutions for the business. Not to put down external consultants, but doing it this way can save you a bundle into the bargain.

• Ease of use for end user
• Analytical reporting
• Easy-to-build dashboards
• Self-service reporting
• Speedy deployment

The PoC for a new business area was not covered by the management reporting platform (controlling of IT processes).

• Built-in monitoring of ETLs (there was no advanced tool for monitoring, planning and evaluation ETLs), I work with SAP BW (i.e. RSMO, RSPCM, ST13 transactions), of course there was an option to have additional expert tool but for a lot of additional money
• Formatted reporting (PDF and export to Excel) - if necessary compile aggregate export to PDF document was not allowed to draw and do parameterized output compile or schedule it as a job with an appropriate distribution to the responsible user group, custom printing to PDF or Excel did not correspond to reality/original

• Built-in monitoring of ETLs
• Formatted reporting
• Print to PDF
• Export to Excel

I have used it for half a year.

I had integration issues with SAP BW.

Technical support is very good.

IBM Cognos was the original MIS platform. Within QV, there are better analytical reporting features.

We implemented it in-house with some external support.

ROI is very long, > 5 year estimation.

Assess the possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of the product as a whole with regard to the general characteristics of MIS systems and considering plans to use a management reporting platform across the enterprise.

The server load, the QVD load, ease of variable declaration, and the different dynamic charts are very valuable to me.

Our complete BI transformation and production was done through QlikView instead of basic Excel reporting and analysis, reducing manual input, ease of automation and more reliability in numbers, thanks to fewer human input errors.

Currently we are building a pane to use filters and select options. For a dashboard, if they would add a "Column value" filter option like what you see in Amazon on the left hand side, that would be useful.

It could also have an autosave feature, which it direly lacks.

A direct feature to export views to PowerPoint, instead of external plugins, could be useful.

Sometimes large files are difficult to read and QlikView crashes midway. So you need to start from scratch. Instead, if it could support reading and processing large files with a lot of records (4 million +), that would be useful. This was one such issue we faced while doing a BI transformation as the data generated was huge.

I have used QlikView for 3-4 years now.

We did not seek technical support. I simply researched answers in forums and through Google searches, blogs etc.

With the help of IT teams, the QlikView online servers were set up (one for production, one for testing). So, implementation was done completely in-house.

ROI can't be measured directly, but the power of BI can be visualized through QlikView.

I personally feel the QlikView server license is extremely expensive and might not be affordable for most organizations. However, all clients felt QlikView was so easy to operate, see results live and visualize in great charts, easily copied to PowerPoint. They were able to easily log in, select their regions, time period and view the results in a single shot instead of viewing multiple Excel reports and looking up, etc.
They used bookmarks for their filters and that made it even easier, rather than entering the inputs every single time.

We evaluated Spotfire, Tableau and finally chose QlikView to be deployed for all dashboards in the organizations.

QlikView can be a powerful tool in your organization if you are serious about a complete BI transformation and moving away from standard Excel reporting.

Given standard training and experience, migrating to QlikView is a very good choice.

QlikView enables fast visualisation, analysis and navigation through data. It is very flexible, and offers easy-to-develop, quick-value tools for navigating and understanding data.

QlikView allows non-technical stakeholders to quickly engage with and navigate through their data as business information.

Data modelling is often a protracted process, with no toolset available apart from scripting. The consequent data models are not very portable at all.

I have used this solution for five years, sometimes more intensively than others.

One of QlikView's greatest strengths is its in-memory handling of large amounts of data. The flipside to this is some ongoing leakage, which makes it sensible to reboot once a week.

Qlik's support model for everyone except large enterprises is through consultant partners, so it depends on the quality of the partner. On the whole, they seem to be good.

It was implemented via a consultant partner. They were technically very good, but one should ensure the consultant delivers comprehensive documentation. A solution is only as good as the ability to navigate through it and enhance it as the business changes.

Although normal advice would be to mandate that the implementation deliver to business-specific requirements, it is strongly recommended to understand the product's great capabilities, and to exploit the competitive advantages of the product. Otherwise, it becomes just another business intelligence tool blindly shoehorned into a business that doesn't gain the best value and ROI from it.

The dynamic interactive dashboard is the most valuable feature of the product to me.

Lots of scripting used to be required to build high quality dashboards.

This cannot be considered a self-service product. It requires IT support.

I have used QlikView for one year.

This is quite a stable product, but very huge data loads must be complemented by good hardware. Otherwise, there could be performance issues.

Technical support is OK.

The only reason we chose this product is its dynamic interactive dashboard. It works well on iPad. We liked the product, as compared to MS BI.

Initial setup is quite straightforward, but it requires good hardware for high data loads.

An in-house team and a vendor team collaborated on the implementation.

It is quite expensive. There are two types of licenses: Named User licenses and Doc CAL licenses.

You need to have good scripting skills.

• Flexibility
• Agile development
• Intuitive
• Very good performance
• Excellent user groups

We use QlikView to create department dashboards. We can create powerful dashboards with useful analysis in a few days.

I think its visualization has room for improvement, and I know Qlik Sense has better visualization.

I have used it for two years.

It's difficult to manage big and complex data models, but the reason is that there isn't a semantic layer in Qlikview, but not having a semantic layer is a good point in other aspects, like agile development.

Excellent, very good and active community.

I have used Business Objects and Microstrategy. QlikView is a different tool. It has advantages and disadvantages compared to Business Objects or Microstrategy. The main advantages are flexibility and agile development.

It was straightforward.

We haven't calculated the ROI yet.

I think the pricing is really competitive.

QlikView is an excellent reporting and data discovery tool. I have used it on a departmental scale, but not on a corporate level so I don't know how it will behave on that level.