QlikTech enables intelligent collaboration with QlikView 11

Independent business intelligence firm QlikTech has introduced new collaboration, comparative analysis and mobile capabilities in the latest edition of its flagship software QlikView 11.

QlikTech said the updated software will help businesses utilise the collective intelligence of a group or department to accelerate better decisions on data.

"QlikView is a major release because it integrates the world of collaboration and business intelligence, based on the premise that decision making is not a solo sport," Jeff Boehm, vice president of global product marketing at QlikTech, told V3.

"Business intelligence for decades has been about getting insight from numbers, but ultimately you do not want to make decisions based on numbers, you want to collaborate with people before making a decision."

Boehm said that from the outset QlikView 11 will allow users to collaborate with developers to create business discovery applications.

"Business users may want a particular kind of sales analysis tool that does this or does that, and developers usually spend months trying to create it," said Boehm.

"Then when it is finally created, the specifications don't normally fit what the users had envisioned and the developers have to make changes. It is a never ending cycle."

In the new release of QlikView, developers can share their work with business users as they go along, and invite them to collaborate and co-design the applications, he added.

Once the business discovery applications have been developed, a new QlikView Annotations capability will allow users to add dialogue to the data in front of them, which will also be visible to their colleagues.

Users will be able to link their comments to particular snapshots of the data.

"This means that everyone can see what data they were looking at when they made the comment or suggestion, and allows another person to pick up on their analysis from where they left off," said Boehm.

QlikView users will also be able to share their thoughts on data in real-time with a "live capability", said Boehm.

"This allows them to explore the data together," he said.

QlikTech has also added comparative analysis enhancements to QlikView, which will allow users to contrast multiple data sets. This could be used for comparing the performance of two products, for example.

Boehm added that the product had been optimised for all popular smartphones, such as the Android and the iPhone.

This means that "the software automatically renders one chart or graph at a time, rather than trying to squeeze everything onto a small screen", he explained.

QlikView 11 will ship in the fourth quarter of this year.