Learning Qlik Sense: The Official Guide: Get to grips with the vision of Qlik Sense for next generation business intelligence and data discovery

The first reason is that Qlik's culture, informed by its Swedish roots—the company was founded in the Lund University, Sweden—is restless and questioning. Qlik is driven by the desire to design better ways for people to use information. The company wants to build analytic software that is easy, elegant, and natural to use, bringing computing power to bear on complex data. To do so, it needed to develop a new product that goes beyond the scope of its original product idea.

The second reason to build Qlik Sense is increased competition. Given the success of discovery-led BI, look-alike QlikView mimics are multiplying. The software titans are reworking their BI efforts to emulate Qlik's value proposition and might soon offer a "good enough" simulacrum at a low price point. "Good enough" is very dangerous because mega vendors are willing to give "good enough" away for free. Further, Qlik now also has its own group of fast-follower competitors; firms that focus on one area of the functionality offered by QlikView, often data visualization, and offer compelling capabilities in this narrow area alone. These competitive changes meant that Qlik could not be complacent about its product strengths.

The third and arguably most important reason to build Qlik Sense was the knowledge that if Qlik didn't disrupt itself, a new competitor might. No organization can forestall the arrival of a black swan. The best way to minimize the chance of one appearing on the horizon is to become a competitor yourself. To do so takes courage because it means taking a hard look at the company's established products and having a frank understanding of the external situation that defines how any new product might be used.

This type of critical thinking led Qlik to the realization that what people want from discovery-led BI is changing as the availability and mix of analytic technology skills develops.

Although loved by users, the main QlikView value proposition was really based on its ability to speed up developers' work, giving people the ability to build useful BI apps when needed by business decision-makers. When it came to this type of agility, Qlik was unique and unmatched. Although now things have changed, data-savvy authors, who want to build analytic apps, have a large number of simple, and in many cases free, toolsets to choose from: visualization libraries such as D3 to full application development toolsets such as .NET, Ruby, and web UI programming frameworks such jQuery and Prototype. Many of these toolkits are available on an open source basis and are helpful to create interactive, visual, and data-driven user experiences. Further, the use and capabilities of these developer tools is growing. As such, Qlik's product authors realized that any new product had to provide a standard, simple, and open application development framework in order to fit better into today's technical environment.

Further, the new product had to extend user-driven capabilities to an unheard of level. In the 20 years since QlikView was invented, people's expectations of technology have shifted based on their experience as consumers. BI technology has to meet these needs, providing an immersive, immediately accessible experience that functions on their device of choice instantly. The whole idea of data discovery is putting power in the hands of every user. The new product had to be barrier-free when it came to adoption. For example, anyone using it had to be able to make sense of an application that a developer built easily; or add a much-needed chart to an existing app; or, bring data into a Qlik Sense to build a simple app with no prelearning required.