Qlik recently announced its decision to acquire Attunity, which has built technology to seamlessly move data in real time across multiple cloud environments and data lakes.

Qlik was founded in Sweden and is now headquartered in the United States and brings data to around 48,000 customers. The company has realized that just helping Enterprises by making data accessible is not enough. The ability of Enterprises to use data effectively is an equally important part of the value equation. Therefore, the company is now focused on improving the data literacy skills of the end user community and society in general by launching the Data Literacy project. Sangram Aglave, Contributing Editor, BW Businessworld caught up with Arun Balasubramanian, MD, Qlik India to understand the goals of the global analytics vendor.

Extending the Value Equation

Enterprises which started on their BI and Analytics journey about a decade ago have made reasonable progress in making data accessible to the end users. Many Enterprises are now looking for incremental value from their BI and Analytics projects. One source of net new value from data investments can come from using the data effectively. It’s not just having access to information that matters but putting it to use for achieving desired business outcomes is what matters. Arun said “Data literacy is an essential skill in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, empowering people to ask questions of data and machines, build knowledge, make decisions and communicate its meaning with others. Yet, our Data Literacy Project survey has found that only 24 percent of business decision-makers are fully confident in their ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data.” Well known organizations such as Accenture, Cognizant, Experian, Pluralsight, Chartered Institute of Marketing have joined the Data Literacy Project initiative. Collectively the project aims to influence leading organizations to provide data literacy training, to create one of the most extensive library of learning resources and to support global educational institutions to place data literacy into their curriculum. Arun said “Qlik is on a mission to improve data literacy within Enterprises and as well as at the individual level by partnering with academic institutions for human skills development.” According to Qlik, their academic program in India has expanded to over 150 universities with the list touching prominent places of education such as IIM Bangalore, IIM Lucknow, IIM Ahmedabad. Arun said “let look at how we use data before we buy a car. We need to bring a similar paradigm to the business world in which the end users are decisive and make quality decisions even in the face of lots of data.”

Shifting to Real time Analytics

Qlik recently announced its decision to acquire Attunity, which has built technology to seamlessly move data in real time across multiple cloud environments and data lakes. Arun said “This acquisition expands our enterprise data management solutions.” Qlik acquired PodiumData in 2018 and also plans to bring the industry’s first conversational chatbot for Analytics through its acquisition of Crunchbot. Arun said “all these acquisitions broadens our scope.   Crunchbot interestingly has a development center in Anand, Gujarat. We have integrated all those developers.”