The new Qlik CEO, Mike Capone kicked off the event by describing his vision for Qlik and the Qlik Community going forward. I have to say it is refreshing to watch speakers who actually speak rather than read off teleprompters. Mike is part of the new management team at Qlik and is driving the mantra that Qlik is “completely committed to the entire product portfolio”.

Single Licence Model

This, of course, is a reference to QlikView and customers continued questioning of the long-term viability of the product. To this end, Qlik will start to offer a single license model that covers both products “for a fractional amount of additional maintenance cost.” He referred to this as One User, One License, One Experience. This will include a single Hub/Access Point (which has been promised before, by the way), but will still require separate servers. He also indicated that the Sense product will continue to evolve with better functionality. But this is hardly news.

Data Literacy

One of the major themes of this conference is Data Literacy. This is a recognition that “Data is the currency of the future.” I would argue that it already is in many respects. Analytics will continue to evolve as the engine of the twenty-first-century economy. It’s critical that participants in that economy are data literate. They must have the ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data. I believe this will continue to be a predominant theme throughout the rest of the century. How Analytics Companies address this could very well lead to success or failure in the marketplace.

Qlik Sense

There were product demos of new or soon to be released features in Qlik Sense. These included the following:

• More ability to customize the UI, including themes and a new chart type called a distribution plot, which looks like a combination bar charts and scatter plot.
• Insight Advisor, including the use of the cognitive engine to assist with building analysis objects from scratch.
• Association Recommendations for more assistance using the visual data preparation tools to build data models.
• Accelerated Self Service to improve the ability to develop faster through drag and drop techniques.
• Multi-Layer maps – a more integrated mapping tool providing multiple layers of analysis on a single map.

Qlik Core

There were also demonstrations of Qlik Core – a new offering to the development community that makes available the QLIX engine on a Linux platform.

Finally, we were all encouraged to support Qlik’s global initiatives for charity work. Specifically, a “Bike-A-Thon” that was held during the conference to support the We See Hope campaign in Africa. Infozone had several members participate in Ride for a Cause. It’s great to see that the idea of giving back to our global communities is a theme that has always been a part of Qonnections.