Business intelligence (BI) firm QlikTech has launched a new version of its flagship QlikView product that is available immediately and can be delivered via the cloud.

QlikView 9 offers enhanced enterprise manageability, performance and scalability with an emphasis on real-time data, according to the firm.

The company was recognised by Gartner as the fastest growing BI vendor, in a market dominated by large players such as Business Objects, SAS and Cognos.

QlikTech lacks some of the benefits offered by the big vendors, but its fast growth is down to the amount it can spend on research and development owing to a large venture capitalist backing. The software also has a particularly user-friendly interface that can be demonstrated on the spot in sales meetings.

Anthony Deighton, product vice president at QlikTech, claimed that QlikView 9 will provide users with a business intelligence platform that can be accessed anywhere. Even employees at companies that are not paying customers of QlikTech will be able to use a limited version of the tool, which Deighton described as "a first for the BI industry".

QlikTech launched a BI application for the iPhone in April, and has added mobile support for QlikView 9 with a new QlikView Java Mobile client for devices running Java Virtual Machine. QlikView 9 also supports BlackBerry and Symbian-based smartphones.

QlikView 9 can be deployed in the cloud using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud web service as the backbone.

"In the past you had to buy a physical server to run our application, but now you can have QlikView running within 15 minutes," said Deighton. Apart from faster time-to-value, Deighton noted that the on-demand model would allow customers to scale capacity on the fly, and reduce IT infrastructure costs.

Deighton played down suggestions that the cloud version could affect sales of its on-premise offering. "While some BI vendors only work in the cloud, we believe it is important for our customers that we support the two," he said.

QlikView 9 offers new visualisation techniques to give users more flexibility when analysing data, and a global search function which allows users to search every QlikView field simultaneously from anywhere in the application.

The company has also begun a new focus on real-time data to ensure that all QlikView analyses reflect the reality in business environments.

QlikTech has additionally improved the manageability and scalability of QlikView. Deighton claimed that, while previous versions had scaled to two billion records, QlikView 9 has no limits and can be deployed by much larger enterprises.

Administrators will have access to new highly visual control panels to provide a clear view of all QlikView servers and modules to help them monitor usage and resource application.

QlikView Personal Edition will be free to download for anyone to create personalised applications. While business users can benefit from the tool individually, their company will need to hold a QlikTech licence if they want to share the information.