QlikView from a MicroStrategy Consultant’s Perspective

Posted by William on 06/04/2009 under News | 3 Comments to Read

An interesting article about Qlikview from a Microstrategy Consultant’s perspective.

In short:
The writer has been working with MSTR for the last 7 years. He has known QV for only 3 months and its internal workings since last week.

The writer is impressed with the presentation layer (a.k.a the reporting layer). “Its very sleek and crisp and the whole graph building and design is much easier and very intuitive as compared to MicroStrategy (MSTR).” He hates to say it, but much better than MSTR

He thinks another important feature of QV is that it doesn’t have Filters, Metrics, Prompts, Custom Groups, and most of the ‘Application Objects’ of MSTR nor does it have a Metadata. “Therefore, the deployment of the presentation layer is pretty fast. I know it sounds weird for us MSTR consultants, but it’s true and it works seamlessly.”

For all its good presentation layer and innovative ‘Associative DB’ concepts he does not think its very scalable.

“Good for Data marts and Departmental BI that need fast deployment. Of course effort is needed in building a robust ETL layer (that leads to a good Associative DB)”

Read the whole article here

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Tags: consultant, microstrategy, qlikview

DrNick said,

Interesting comments from ‘the other side of the fence’ as it were.

The only point I would query is that the second point sounds like the lack of metadata is a good thing! For my implementations of QV over the past 2 years – the lack of capability regarding metadata is the biggest detractor for QlikView.

Without the ability to link into Enterprise models from ErWin/Rose/etc. it means that the QV team have to spend valuable development hours rebuilding logic that’s already in other tools.

In terms of not being very scalable – isn’t this a justification that for QlikView to be really taken seriously as a BI application, it needs to demonstrate a rollout to 10,000 users+? Otherwise it may (unfortunately or not) be permanently labelled as a ‘workgroup BI’ tool and consequently retired as departments eventually seek to consolidate these data silos?
William said,

Thanks for sharing your experience and I certainly agree with your first point.

On your second point, however, I’m questioning if it is really that nescessary to demonstrate a rollout to 10000+ users to be labelled “a seriously BI application”. After all there is a whole big world below the 10000+ user border which explains the continuous growth of Qliktech as a pure BI vendor.

Besides that, is workgroup BI really that bad? (Gartner speculates that workgroup BI could become more popular over the coming year because of the economic downturn, Januari BI Magic Quadrant). If there is an enterprise-wide BI strategy, it can work. Without it, workgroup BI , like you said, is leading to siloed BI implementations. Without a data warehouse behind it, workgroup BI quickly becomes another disconnected, siloed application. With that being said, it’s getting clear that Qlikview, especially for bigger implementations, is not a BI platform on it’s own, without a solid data integration solution.

Of course workgroup BI has its detractors. But solutions like Qlikview empowers business users and make it easier to get at the data they want, run the analyses they want and performing seemingly unlimited what-if analysis. Isn’t that what Business Intelligence is all about?

For more information about workgroup BI: Workgroup BI Poised for a Comeback
http://esj.com/Articles/2009/03/25/Workgroup-BI-Poised-for-a-Comeback.aspx?Page=2
Jane said,

The beauty and efficiency of the centralized metadata with MicroStrategy is that it’s built once (quickly) and available across all applications (immediately), whether Mobile, Web-based, or Desktop. This kind of “Build Once, Deploy Anywhere” is one of the many things that companies love about MicroStrategy software.