Hopefully there will be more focus on talking to users about what they want and need. Many of the acquisitions have been sound – DataMarket for example is a good example where it complements the Qlik portfolio. They don’t seem to have engaged with users fully about how they then use this acquisition – presently you have to subscribe to a whole tranche of their data in order to be able to use any of it. A sweetshop approach where you can pick-and-mix your data would appear to me to be more what is required.

That is a tough call. As someone that came from a Microsoft background (.Net, SQL Server, ASP) I would hate to have to go back that way – but Power BI does seem to be getting some development behind it. I would have to take a fair bit of time to regroup, but I would probably look to be platform agnostic and really focus on content and design rather than platform.

Hi Barry,

Many thanks for posting the link to your well researched and thought out article, it certainly makes for interesting reading.

Steve

Hi Martin,

Thank you for your insights. Certainly sounds like there will be interesting times ahead, and we can expect to see a faster rate of change in the organisation than there has been for a while.

Hopefully if Qlik is reshaped to be more profitable when a re-sale happens it is more likely to be able to continue on in its own path rather than having the technology carved up.

I agree that this will probably as close to situation normal as it could’ve gotten, but still think the company will go through some big changes. Have written down some of my thoughts (and concerns) here: http://www.qlikfix.com/2016/06/03/thoma-bravo-acquires-qlik-3-billion-usd/

Cheers,
Barry

Private Equity firms are usually involved in those deals for one reason only – to make money. Similar to someone buying property to renovate it, PEs take companies private, restructure and sell or go public again. The latter is the case when a company is usually in trouble due to bad management. In Qlik’s case though the numbers seem solid – my only guess is they plan to restructure Qlik and prepare it for a bigger sell-off to a larger vendor in 1-2 years time. What’s positive about it is that Qlik will then likely become more corporate/enterprise friendly and follow a more adaptive rather than visionary strategy to data analytics.

A good thing to follow now would be to see who gets hired/fired at Qlik in the next months…

Thanks for your comment. My concern is that Qlik may be ‘encouraged’ to put their prices up, or phase out products that smaller businesses rely on – such as QlikView Desktop. Only time will tell though.