I have yet to find a client who doesn’t ‘get’ the statement “new big release, might be some bugs initially, consider letting other customers find them”. Most common response is obviously “yes, let’s be a bit conservative”, but sometimes it’s “I NEED XYZ” instead :-)

I agree, especially on the need to improve visualisation and chart options. It’s really becoming urgent…

Yet another example of a tech company falling into the ‘if Apple do it then so must we’ – just because Apple have adopted (in the past) a 12mth release cycle doesn’t mean it fits for everyone. Enterprise software (as Qlikview is fast becoming) moves at a much slower pace; as you say you’re still upgrading sites from v8.5.

I sat in on a WebEx by Chris Furlong covering the new features of v11 – some good points but nothing earth shattering in my mind, but two points concerned me:

1. The un-relenting focus on ‘Mobile BI’; I don’t doubt it has a place and I generally like the Safari/Android implementation but in v11 for the first time in v11 we saw UI designed for ‘touch’ being used in the desktop version of Qlikview (AJAX ‘Properties’ box if I remember correctly) – thus the desktop version is touch optimized and suffers as a result – why!? I’d love to know the proportion of Qlikview apps that are truly accessed via tablets (my guess would be well under 5%) so why does the other 95% have to suffer for it? Hopefully this won’t be the start of a slippery slope. I was in a room full of Qliktech partners at Qonnections and someone asked out of the 100 or so people present how many had implemented iPhone /iPad for their roster of clients; 2 people put there hand up. (I do expect the Safari Touch implementations to gain traction as they are at least usable.)

2. On the whole the v11 releases are in my mind focused around Enterprise Mgmt – which is un-doubtedly a good thing however this seems to have been at the expense of the UI; which hasn’t been overhauled in years. In the past this hasn’t been an issue; users had a choice; Qlikview or Excel, BO, Cognos and their bland boring ilk, unfortuntatly this isn’t the case anymore. More and more I’m seeing SiB’s where Tableau, Spatial Key and Spotfire are being mentioned by prospects; all of which have a much better out of the box interface and appear to the end user to be easier to use – which used to be one of Qlikview’s USP’s.

Neatly summed up here: http://andpointsbeyond.com/2011/04/01/can-a-humble-chart-object-get-some-love/

It doesn’t matter how fancy or easy to manage the back-end is if the point at which the data consumers actually interact with their data isn’t up to scratch (or no longer comparable to the competition) then they are going to look elsewhere for their BI…mobile or otherwise.

Matt – Visual Analytics Ltd

I personally would go for the upgrade – as there are some great features in 10 (multi-threaded reloads, linked objects and syntax highlighting are very useful), but it may be worth looking at the feature list for 11 to decide if you want to hold off.