By Keith Smith, Bardess Senior Consultant 

Readers of this newsletter are likely already aware of our excitement around QlikView, a powerful "business discovery" platform that delivers self-service BI, empowering business users to discover new insights and make better decisions.   

Bardess has been delivering innovative QlikView applications to companies across the US for years, and I am thrilled to be a part of the journey.  As I interact with current and prospective customers, their excitement around the product and its analytical capabilities comes across loud and clear.  And, during every one of these interactions, I am reminded of my own first experience with QlikView, as a customer, and the culture change I was lucky to be a part of.

I had just started working for a large, well-known Fortune 200 company.  Critical information regarding sales, orders, and inventory resided in various systems and databases that were slow-performing and difficult to access.  Management reports required days of human labor to assemble and distribute, reducing their timeliness and, therefore, their usefulness.  I had been tasked with the exciting (yet intimidating) assignment of making improvements to these processes and delivering new insights to managers and executives.  During those first few weeks and months, after gaining additional understanding of our business and the many scattered information systems that kept things running, I thought to myself:  "There has to be a better way!"

Enter QlikView.  During my research of different Business Intelligence vendors, QlikView came across my radar.  The challenges it claimed to address were some of the same that I was experiencing - slow query response times, a need to combine and report on data from multiple source systems, and a steep learning curve, even for a technical person like myself (not to mention the managers and executives who really needed them).  "What have I got to lose?" I thought.  I downloaded the free trial, connected to some source data, and loaded it into QlikView.  Next I re-created some of the reports, charts and tables management depended on.  The ease of use, lightning fast response times, and clickable "path to discovery" were like nothing I had ever seen.  It didn't take more than a few days for me to arrive at the obvious conclusion:  THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.

NEXT:  How One-Second Results Change Everything.