Qlikview.Next has a gift for Tableau and Datawatch

Yesterday I got invited by Qliktech for their semi-annual New England QlikView Boston User Group meeting. It was so many participants, so Qliktech was forced to hold the Keynote (of course the presentation and the demo of Qlikview.Next) and 4 cool presentations by Customers and Partners (Ocean State Job Lot, Analog Devices, Cybex and Attivio) outside of its own office but in the same building  on the 1st floor @Riverside Offices in Newton, MA @Rebecca's Cafe.
It was plenty of very excited people in a very large room and very promising demo and presentation of Qlikview.Next, which actually will not be generally available until 2014. Entire presentation was done using new and capable HTML5 client, based on functionality Qliktech got when it bought NComVA 6 months ago.
I was alarmed when presenter never mentioned my beloved Qlikview Desktop and I when I asked directly about it, the answer shocked and surprised me. One of the most useful piece of software I ever used will not be part of Qlikview.Next anymore. As part of Qlikview 11.2, it will be supported for 3 years and then it will be out of the picture! I did not believe it and asked one more time during demo and 2 more times after presentation in-person during Networking and Cocktail Hour inside Qliktech offices. While food and drink were excellent, the answer on my question was the same - NO!


I have the utmost respect for very smart software developers, architects and product managers of Qlikview, but in this particular case I have to invoke 20+ years of my own advanced and very extensive experience as the Software Architect, Coder and Software Director and nothing in my past can support such a decision. I do not see why Qlikview.Next can not have both (and we as Qlikview users need and love both) Qlikview Desktop Client and Qlikview HTML5 client?

I personally urge Qliktech (and I am sure the majority of 100000+ (according to Qliktech) Qlikview community will agree with me) to keep Qlikview Desktop client as long as Qlikview exist. And not just keep it but 1st,  keep it as the best Data Visualization Desktop Client on market and 2nd, keep it in sync (or better ahead) with HTML5 client.

In case if Qlikview Desktop will disappear from Qlikview.Next, it will be a huge gift to Tableau and Datawatch (and may be even Spotfire will benefit from it).

Tableau recently invested heavily into progress of all variations of Tableau Desktop (Professional, Personal, Public, Online, Free Reader) including (finally) migration to 64-bit and even porting Desktop to MAC, so it will instantly get the huge advantage over Qlikview in desktop, workstation, development, design, debugging, testing, QA  and offline environments.

It will also almost immediately propel the Datawatch as a very attractive contender in Data Visualization market, because Datawatch got (when they bought Panopticon this year) the extremely capable Panopticon Desktop Designer

in addition to its own very relevant line of products.
Again, I hope I misunderstood answer I got 4 times during 4-hour meeting and during follow-up networking/cocktail hour or if understood it correctly, Qliktech will reconsider, but I will respect their decision if they don't...

So I have to disagree with Cindi Howson (as usual): even if "QlikTech Aims To Disrupt BI, Again", it actually will disrupt itself first, unless it will listen me begging them to keep Qlikview Desktop alive, well and ahead of competition.

You can find in Ted Cuzzillo's article here: http://datadoodle.com/2013/10/09/next-for-qlik/ the actual quote from Qliktech's CEO Lars Björk: "“We can disrupt the industry again”. My problem with this quote that Qliktech considers itself as the insider and reinventor of the dead and slow BI industry, while Tableau with its new motto "DATA to the people" is actually trying to be out of this grave and be inside own/new/fast growing Data Visualization space/field/market, see also blogpost from Tony Cosentino, VP of Ventana Research, here:
http://tonycosentino.ventanaresearch.com/2013/09/21/tableau-continues-its-visual-analytics-revolution/#!
You can see below interview with Time Beyers, who has own doubts about Qlikview.Next from investor's point of view:


Basically, Qlikview.Next is late for 2 years, it will not have Qlikview Desktop (big mistake), it still does not promise any Qlikview Cloud services similar to Tableau Online and Tableau Public and it still does not have server-less distribution of visualizations because it does not have free Qlikview Desktop Viewer/Readers similar to free Tableau Reader. So far it looks to me that QLIK may have a trouble in the future...

2 Free Microstrategy Visualization tools Disrupt it all!

Famous Traditional BI vendor got sick and tired to be out of Data Visualization market and decided to insert itself into it by force by releasing today 2 Free (for all users) Data Visualization Products:

• MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop™ (Free self-service visual analytics tool)
• MicroStrategy Analytics Express™ (Free Cloud-based self-service visual analytics)

That looks to me as the huge Disruption of Data Visualization Market: For example similar Desktop Product from Tableau costs $1999 and Cloud Product called Tableau Online costs $500/year/user. It puts Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire to a very tough position price-wise. However only Tableau stock went down almost $3 (more then %4) today, but MSTR, TIBX an QLIK basically did not react on Microstrategy announcement):

And don't think that only MIcrostrategy trying to get into DV market. For example SAP did similar (in less-dramatic and non-disruptive fashion) a few months ago with SAP Lumira (Personal Edition is free), also SAP Cloud and Standard edition available too, see it here http://www.saplumira.com/index.php and here http://store.businessobjects.com/store/bobjamer/en_US/Content/pbPage.sap-lumira . 

SAP senior vice president and platform head Steve Lucas 10 weeks ago was asked if SAP would consider buying Tableau, Lucas went in the opposite direction. “We aren’t going to buy Tableau,” Lucas said with a smile on his face. “There’s no need to buy an overvalued software company.” Rather, SAP wants to crush companies like Tableau (I doubt it is possible, but SAP is free to try) and build own Data Visualization product line out of Lumira, read more at
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/30/sap-platform-head-tableau-overvalued/#yFzUpzOh6ivMYvqP.99
If I will be Tableau, Qlikview or Spotfire I will not worry yet about Microstrategy competition yet, because it is unclear how the future R&D for free Analytics Desktop and Express will be funded - out of MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise™ R&D budget? That can be tricky, considering as of right now Tableau hiring hard (163 open job positions as of yesterday!) and Qliktech is very active too (about 93 openings as of yesterday) and even TIBCO has 36 open positions just for Spotfire alone.But I may start to worry about other DV Vendor - Datawatch, who recently completed the acquisition of Panopticon. Datawatch grew 45% YoY (2012-over-2011), has only 124 employees but $27.5M in sales, very experienced leadership, 40000+ customers worldwide and mature product line. May be another evidence of it here: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20131023-907942.html

New MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise 9.4 includes data blending, which allows users to combine data from more than one source; the software stores the data in working memory without the need for a separate data integration product.  9.4 can connect with the MongoDB NoSQL data store as well as Hadoop distributions from Hortonworks, Intel and Pivotal. It comes with the R, adds better ESRI integration. The application can now fit 10 times as much data in memory as the previous version could, and the self-service querying now runs up to 40 percent faster.

The three MicroStrategy Analytics Platform products also share a common user experience—making it easy to start small with self-service analytics and grow into the production-grade features of Enterprise. Desktop and Express from Microstrategy can be naturally extended (for fee)  to a new enterprise-grade BI&DV Suite, also released today and called MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise™ (known under other name as MIcrostrategy Suite 9.4).

MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise™ Suite is also available starting today for free for developers and non-production use: 10 named user licenses of MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, MicroStrategy Web Reporter and Analyst, MicroStrategy Mobile, MicroStrategy Report Services, MicroStrategy Transaction Services, MicroStrategy OLAP Services, MicroStrategy Distribution Services, and MultiSource Option. 1 named user license of development software, MicroStrategy Web Professional, MicroStrategy Developer, and MicroStrategy Architect The server components have a 1 CPU limit).
Quote from Wayne Eckerson, President of  BI Leader Consulting:
"The new MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop makes MicroStrategy a top-tier competitor in the red-hot visual discovery market. The company was one of the first traditional enterprise BI vendors to ship a visual discovery tool, so its offering is mature compared to others in its peer group, but it was locked away inside its existing platform. By offering a stand-alone desktop visual discovery tool and making it freely available, MicroStrategy places itself among" Data Visualization Leaders.

You also can read today's article from very frequent visitor to my blog (his name Akram), who is the Portfolio and Hedge Manager, Daily Trader and excellent investigator of all Data Visualization Stocks, DV Market and DV Vendors. His article "Tableau: The DV Market Just Got More Crowded"  can be found here (cannot resist to quote: "Microstrategy is priced like it has nothing to do with this space, and Tableau is priced like it will own the whole thing."):http://seekingalpha.com/article/1760432-tableau-the-dv-market-just-got-more-crowded?source=yahoo

[caption id="attachment_4413" align="aligncenter" width="510"] Heatmap generated by Microstrategy Analytic Desktop[/caption]

MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop.

It's free visual analytics: Free Visual Insight, 100M per file, 1GB total storage, 1 of user, Free e-mail support for 30 days. Free access to online training, forum, and knowledge base, Data Sources: xls, csv, RDBMSes, Multidimensional Cubes, MapReduce, Columnar DBs, Access with Web Browser, export to Excel, PDF, flash and images, email distribution. The product is freely available to all and can be downloaded instantly at:http://www.microstrategy.com/free/desktop .

[caption id="attachment_4415" align="aligncenter" width="510"] TRellis of Bar Charts generated by Microstrategy Analytics Desktop[/caption]
http://www.microstrategy.com/Strategy/media/downloads/free/analytics-desktop_quick-start-guide.pdf Kevin Spurway, MicroStrategy’s vice president of industry and mobile marketing said: "The new desktop software was designed to compete with other increasingly popular self-serve, data-discovery desktop visualization tools offered by Tableau and others". To work with larger data sets, a user should have 2GB or more of working memory on the computer, Spurway said.

MicroStrategy Analytics Express.

MicroStrategy Analytics Express is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application that delivers all the rapid-fire self-service analytical capabilities of Desktop, plus reports and dashboards, native mobile applications, and secure team-based collaboration – all instantly accessible in the Cloud. Today, the Express community includes over 32,000 users across the globe.

In this release, Express inherits all the major functional upgrades of the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform, including new data blending features, improved performance, new map analytics, and much more. For a limited time, MicroStrategy is also making Express available to all users free for a year. With this valuable offer, users will be able to establish an account, invite tens, hundreds, or even thousands of colleagues to connect, analyze and share their data and insight, and do it all at no charge. For some organizations, the potential value of this offer can be $1 million or more. Users can sign up, access the service, and take advantage of this offer instantly at
www.microstrategy.com/free/express
MicroStrategy Analytics Express includes Free Visual Insight, Free web browser and iPad access, Free SaaS for one year, 1GB upload per file, unlimited number of users, Free e-mail support for 30 days. Free access to online training, forum, and knowledge base. Data Sources: xls, csv, RDBMSes Columnar DBs, Drobbox, Google Drive Connector, Visual Insight, a lot of security and a lot more, see http://www.microstrategy.com/Strategy/media/downloads/free/analytics-express_user-guide.pdf

All tools from Microstrategy Analytics Platform (Desktop, Express and Entereprise Suite) support standard list of Chart Styles and Types:

• Bar (Vertical/Horizontal Clustered/Stacked/100% Stacked),
• Line (Vertical/Horizontal Absolute/Stacked/100% Stacked),
• Combo Chart (of Bar and Area),
• Area (Vertical/Horizontal Absolute/Stacked/100% Stacked)
• Dual Axis ( Bar/Line/Area Vertical/Horizontal), 
• HeatMap, 
• Scatter, Scatter Grid, 
• Bubble, Bubble Grid, 
• Grid,

• 
  
• Pie, Ring, 
• ESRI Maps, 

• Network Visualization of Nodes, with lines representing links/connections/relationship,

• Microcharts and Sparklines
• 
  

Data and Word Clouds, and of course any kind of interactive Dashboards as combination of all of the above Charts, Graphs, and Marks:
Interactive Dashboard Generated by Microstrategy Analytics Express

Spotfire 6 is announced

Yesterday TIBCO announced Spotfire 6 with features, competitive with Tableau 8.1 and Qlikview.Next (a.k.a Qlikview 12). 
Some new features will be showcased at TUCON® 2013, TIBCO's annual user conference, October 14-17, 2013, and more details will be shown in webcasts and webinars (I personally prefer detailed articles, blogposts, slides, PDFs and Demos, but TIBCO's corporate culture ignores my preferences for years) on 10/30/13 by Steve Farr

• here: http://lp.spotfire.tibco.com/Global_Webcast_2013Spotfire6OctoberAM.html and
• here: http://lp.spotfire.tibco.com/Global_Webcast_2013Spotfire6OctoberPM.html

Spotfire 6.0 will be available in mid-November, presumably the same time as Tableau 8.1 and before then Qlikview.Next so TIBCO is not a loser in Leap-frogging game for sure...
TIBCO bought the Extended Results and will presumably will show the integration with PSUHBI product, see it here: http://www.pushbi.com/ ; TIBCO called it as Delivery of  personal KPIs and Metrics on any mobile phone, tablet or laptop, online or offline (new name for it will be TIBCO Spotfire^® Consumer):

Another TIBCO's Purchase is MAPORAMA and integration with it TIBCO called (very appropriately) as the Location Analytics with promise to

• Visualize, explore and analyze data in the context of location
• Expand situational understanding with multi-layered geo-analytics

Mashup new data sources to provide precise geo-coding across the enterprise

Spotfire Location Services is the Agnostic Platform and supports (I guess this needs to be verified, because sounds too good to be true) any map service, including own TIBCO, ESRI (Spotfire integrates with ESRI previously), Google:

TIBCO has Event processing capabilities (e.g StreamBase, they bought a few months ago, see it here: http://www.streambase.com/news-and-events/press-releases/pr-2013/tibco-software-acquires-streambase-systems/#axzz2hiEjnr9X) and it will be interesting to see the new Events Analytics product (see also: http://www.streambase.com/products/streambasecep ) integrated with Spotfire 6:

• Identify new trends and outliers with continuous process monitoring
• Automate the delivery of analytics applications based on trends
• Operationalize analytics to support continuous process improvement:

One more capability in Spotfire mentioned (this claim needs to be verified) in recent TIBCO blogpost http://www.tibco.com/blog/2013/10/11/connecting-the-loops-the-next-step-in-decision-management/ as the ability to overlap 2 related but separated in real-life processes: the processes of analysis (discovery of insights in data) and execution (deciding and actions) could be separated by days, but with Spotfire 6.0 the entire decision process can happen in real time:

For business user Spotfire 6 has new web-based authoring (Spotfire has a few "Clients", one called Web Player and another called Enterprise Player, both are not free unlike Tableau Free Reader or Tableau Public). Bridging the gap between simple dashboards and advanced analytic applications, Spotfire 6.0 provides a new client "tailored to meet the needs of the everyday business user, who typically has struggled to manipulate pivot tables and charts to address their data discovery needs".

With this new web application, known as TIBCO Spotfire^® Business Author, business users can visually explore and interact with data, whether residing in a simple spreadsheet or dashboard, a database, or a predefined analytic application. It will definitely compete with Web Authoring in Tableau 8.1 and incoming Qlikview.Next.

For me personally the most interesting new feature is new Spotfire Cloud Services (supposedly the continuation of Spotfire SIlver, which I like but it is overpriced and non-competitive storage-wise vs. Tableau Public and Tableau Online cloud services). Here is the quote from yesterday's Press Release: "TIBCO Spotfire^® Cloud is a new set of cloud services for enterprises, work groups, and personal use (see some preliminary info here: https://marketplace.cloud.tibco.com/marketplace/marketplace/apps#/sc :

• Personal: Web-based product, Upload Excel, .csv and .txt data, 12 visualization types, 100 GB of data storage
• Workgroup: Web-based and desktop product, Connect and integrate multiple data sources, All visualization types, 250 GB of data storage
• Enterprise: Web-based and desktop product, Connect to 40+ data sources, All visualization types, Advanced statistics services, 500 GB of data storage

TIBCO Spotfire^® Cloud Enterprise provides a secure full-featured version of Spotfire in the cloud to analyze and collaborate on business insights, whether or not the data is hosted. For project teams seeking data discovery as a service, TIBCO Spotfire^® Cloud Work Group provides a wealth of application-building tools so distributed teams can visually explore data quickly and easily and deploy analytic applications at a very low cost. For individuals looking for a single step to actionable insight, TIBCO Spotfire^®Personal is a cost-effective web-based client for quick data discovery needs."

Spotfire 6 has enterprise-class, R-compatible statistical engine: TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR) which is  the part of excellent TIBCO Spotfire Statistics Services (TSSS). TSSS allows Integration of R (including TERR), Spotfire's own S+ (SPlus is Spotfire's commercial version of R), SAS® and MATLAB® into Spotfire and custom applications. TERR, see http://spotfire.tibco.com/en/discover-spotfire/what-does-spotfire-do/predictive-analytics/tibco-enterprise-runtime-for-r-terr.aspx supports:

• Support for paralelized R-language scripts in TERR
• Support for call outs to open source R from TERR
• Use RStudio – the most popular IDE in the R Community-to develop your TERR scripts
• Over a thousand TERR compatible CRAN packages

Among other news is support for new Data Sources: http://spotfire.tibco.com/en/resources/support/spotfire-data-sources.aspx including SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse v.7.0.1 (required TIBCO Connector Link).

General note: I maintain my opinion that the best way for TIBCO to capitalize on tremendous hidden market value of Spotfire is to spin-it off as EMC did with VMWare. My other concern is too many offices involved with Spotfire: (Parental) TIBCO's HQ in California, R&D office in Sweden and Main marketing, sales and consulting office in Massachusetts. My advise to have only one main office in MA, which is compatible with spin-off idea. Tableau has advantage here with concentrating their main office in Seattle.

Visualization of Census 2010 (Population by States, County, MSA and ZIP5)

Learn About Tableau

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/StateCountyZip/PopulationByZip?:embed=y#2

The BI is a dead horse, long live the DV!

Last month Tableau and Qliktech both declared that Traditional BI is too slow (I am saying this for many years) for development and their new Data Visualization (DV software) is going to replace it. Quote from Tableau's CEO: Christian Chabot: "Traditional BI software is obsolete and dying and this is very direct challenge and threat to BI vendors: your (BI that is) time is over and now it is time for Tableau." Similar quote from Anthony Deighton, Qliktech's CTO & Senior VP, Products: "More and more customers are looking at QlikView not just to supplement traditional BI, but to replace it".

One of my clients - large corporation (obviously cannot say the name of it due NDA) asked me to advise of what to choose between Traditional BI tools with long Development Cycle (like Cognos, Business Objects or Microstrategy), modern BI tools (like JavaScript and D3 toolkit) which is attempt to modernize traditional BI but still having  sizable development time and leading Data Visualization tools with minimal development time (like Tableau, Qlikview or Spotfire).

Since main criterias for client were

• minimize IT personnel involved and increase its productivity;
• minimize the off-shoring and outsourcing as it limits interactions with end users;
• increase end users's involvement, feedback and action discovery.

So I advised to client to take some typical Visual Report project from the most productive Traditional  BI Platform (Microstrategy), use its prepared Data and clone it with D3 and Tableau (using experts for both). Results in form of Development time in hours) I put below; all three projects include the same time (16 hours) for Data Preparation & ETL, the same time for Deployment (2 hours) and the same number (8) of Repeated Development Cycles (due 8 consecutive feedback from End Users):


It is clear that Traditional BI requires too much time, that D3 tools just trying to prolongate old/dead BI traditions by modernizing and beautifying BI approach, so my client choose Tableau as a replacement for Microstrategy, Cognos, SAS and Business Objects and better option then D3 (which require smart developers and too much development). This movement to leading Data Visualization platforms is going on right now in most of corporate America, despite IT inertia and existing skillset. Basically it is the application of the simple known principle that "Faster is better then Shorter", known in science as Fermat's Principle of least time.
This changes made me wonder (again) if Gartner's recent marketshare estimate and trends for Dead Horse sales (old traditional BI) will stay for long. Gartner estimates the size of BI market as $13B which is drastically different from TBR estimate ($30B). TBR predicts that it will keep growing at least until 2018 with yearly rate 4% and BI Software Market to Exceed $40 Billion by 2018 (They estimate BI Market as $30B in 2012 and include more wider category of Business Analytics Software as opposed to strictly BI tools). I added estimates for Microstrategy, Qliktech, Tableau and Spotfire to Gartner's MarketShare estimates for 2012 here:


"Traditional BI is like a pencil with a brick attached to it" said Chris Stolte at recent TCC13 conference and Qliktech said very similar in its recent announcement of Qlikview.Next. I expect TIBCO will say similar about upcoming new release of Spotfire (next week at TUCON 2013 conference in Las Vegas?)


These bold predictions by leading Data Visualization vendors are just simple application of Fermat's Principle of Least Time: this principle stated that the path taken between two points by a ray of light (or development path in our context) is the path that can be traversed in the least time.

Fermat's principle can be easily applied to "PATH" estimates to multiple situations like in video below, where path from initial position of the Life Guard on beach to the Swimmer in Distress (Path through Sand, Shoreline and Water) explained:

Even Ants following the Fermat's Principle (as described in article at Public Library of Science here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0059739 ) so my interpretation of this Law of Nature ("Faster is better then Shorter") that  traditional BI is a dying horse and I advise everybody to obey the Laws of Nature.

If you like to watch another video about Fermat's principle of Least Time and related Snell's law, you can watch this:

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