Steve Dark

Hi, I am Steve Dark, owner and QlikView consultant at Quick Intelligence.

To start at the start; I was born and raised in Yeovil, Somerset, and started tinkering with programming as soon as I was able on the ZX Spectrum and Commodore Amiga. This carried on through education and then work life.

My first development job was working on software emulators for helicopter control panels developed in Microsoft FoxPro. From there I went on to a company building private school administration software in Borland Delphi and then on to a small company building CRM systems in Microsoft Visual Basic.

Things really clicked for me when I realised that a RDBMS can be far more than just a data repository and the ability to build applications in a web browser became a more practical reality.

I joined a company building bespoke software for the financial services market using Microsoft SQL Server and ASP. We built a web based application shell which dealt with common functions such as authentication and permissions. It also had a reporting module to deliver data securely to a user browser in a tabular format. The data could be sliced and diced and then exported.

Whilst this approach of delivering just columns and rows worked fine it became apparent that a complementary offering was required to do the visualisations on the data – enter QlikView. The company saw it, liked it, and signed up as a partner.

Once seeing what QlikView had to offer I decided that I wanted to spend all of my time delivering solutions using it. This simply was not going to happen at a company where I had ten years worth of SQL and ASP code that needed supporting – so I decided to move on. Initially I sought employment with other QlikTech partners – but with a major recession biting hard there was no one looking to take on a full time QlikView developer. It became apparent that the only way to achieve my goals was to strike out on my own, and Quick Intelligence was born.

I am happy to say that both my ex-employer and a large proportion of the QlikTech partners that I approached for work back then are now clients of Quick Intelligence. Now I use QlikView every day of my working life and deliver exceptional solutions to my clients enabling insight into their business well beyond their expectations.