Qlik Connect 2024: A Chocolate Alligator and a Bunch of AI Announcements

Qlik is an industry leader in the field of data integration and analytics. And last week at their annual conference in Orlando, they made announcements that firmly cements them in the field of AI. Let’s dive into the main Qlik Connect announcements.

Who is Qlik?

Qlik’s platform and services provide AI, data integration and quality, and analytics. Their goal is to help enterprise organizations deliver better business outcomes. Qlik has 40,000 customers and 2,000 partners.

They have been making strategic investments over the last few years that brought them to the AI announcements they made at Qlik Connect this year (see this Digital Sunshine blog post for their acquisition timeline ).

Qlik Talend Cloud:

Talend and Qlik were integrated into a cloud offering aimed at streamlining data usage for AI. Stephen Foskett has a great post with the details . One key point is all the connectors – Qlik wants you to bring your data no matter where it is. They can ingest it or connect to it, it’s up to you.

One great integration point is the data trust score. I need to sit down with my The Tech Aunties Podcast partner in crime Marian Newsome to see what she thinks of this!

Qlik Answers

Qlik Answers is an answer system, not a traditional search system. Qlik points out that there is a big difference between a search result and an answer.

?Qlik Answers uses an organization’s unstructured data as the filter. In fact, the chat bot will not even return an answer until you provide data sources. This is important, because LLMs are bound to hallucinate (or make up data to fulfill your query). Also since it's so expensive and time consuming to train a model, LLM data gets stale very fast.

Organizations are building RAGs – retrieval-augmented generation systems - to counteract these problems. These work by setting up a dataset with the correct, relevant information and then using a generative model such as an LLM (large language model) to reconstruct the information in the best context.

The only problem is that it isn’t a trivial task to set these up. You need the right infrastructure. You’ll need to chunk and index the dataset’s data and then put it into a vector database. You’ll need to test the answers provided and have a way to do all o this continuously as new data is created and added. Also you’ll need to do all the data hygiene: security, backups, etc.

This is where Qlik Answers comes in again. It is completely plug and play. It provides a platform that handles all of the tedious bits, but still keeps the data and answers in your control.?

Strategic Collaboration with AWS

Qlik also announced a collaboration with AWS . This announcement reinforces Qlik’s strategy to meet you where your business data is. This will help customers take advantage of AWS AI Bedrock. SAP customers that move their data to AWS can get better information from that data using Qlik’s analytics.

It’s still all about the workload

I’m still an infrastructure girl. But as I’ve always said, when we are building for the business, we aren't building infrastructure just for the hell of it. We build it for the workloads - so that they are stable, protected, and productive.

That being said, I still have this lingering question…who is "building AI"? But that question will have to wait for another blog post.

What do you think about Qlik’s announcements? Are they ground-breaking, or have you heard all this before? Let me know in the comments!

Disclosure

I attended Qlik Connect as an analyst with Tech Field Day . Tech Field Day covered my transportation, expenses, and ticket. I received a very nice gift basket from Qlik, including a chocolate alligator. But no one has reviewed this post or asked me to write it. This post was not required for my attendance.

This is the link for the chocolate gator: https://www.maitlandchocolate.com/shop/special-occasion-chocolate-gifts/unique-occasion-chocolate-gifts/chocolate-alligator/

LinkedIn - very naughty to strip attribution links!!!

#QlikConnect ?? #QlikDataAnalytics ?? #TechFieldDay ?? #DataViz ??#BusinessIntelligence ?? #AI ?? #ML ??#answermachine #TFDx #QlikAnswers