A Year in Data Integration: How Far We’ve Come

We celebrated our one-year anniversary this year since the acquisition of Attunity, with the formal rebrand to Qlik Data Integration in January 2020. That kicked off a tremendous year of growth and recognition for the data integration business here at Qlik.

Qlik Data Integration is the fastest growing company in the space according to Gartner, outpacing all the legacy vendors and upstarts. We’ve deepened our partnerships with key cloud vendors across the board (AWS, Microsoft, Google), realized great customer traction with brands like J.B. Hunt and saw great industry recognition, including being named Snowflake’s Technology partner of the year for data engineering and Microsoft US Partner of the Year – Intelligent Cloud.

We also launched groundbreaking research with IDC showcasing the impact a healthy data pipeline can have on bottom-line performance. Last, but not least, we acquired Blendr.io to help with the automation and orchestration of data throughout the data supply chain – more to come on that in the new year! 2021 is set up for Qlik Data Integration to continue our momentum to take a true market leadership position as a key driver of Qlik’s end-to-end platform adoption and value for customers. Here’s just a few highlights from 2021.

Your Data Strategy Rank – Data Pipelines Research With IDC
Our research, “Data as the New Water: The Importance of Investing in Data and Analytics Pipelines,” produced in partnership with IDC, shows that organizations with the highest demonstrable data-to-insights capabilities (measured against their performance at each stage in the data pipeline) saw a significant impact to their bottom line. We partnered with IDC to launch the Data to Insights assessment tool that empowers every organization to assess the strength of their own data pipeline and understand where the cracks lie.

Qlik, Microsoft and SAP
Together with Microsoft, we launched a global strategic Proof of Value program to help Azure customers accelerate the analysis of their SAP data in Azure Synapse with the combination of the automated data delivery capabilities of Qlik Data Integration with the agility and openness of the Azure platform. Leveraging Qlik Data Integration’s ability to ingest and automate the delivery of analytics-ready SAP data into Synapse from virtually any SAP source, customers benefit from simplified delivery and use of SAP data for real-time analytics on Azure Synapse.

Snowflake Technology Partner of the Year
It is with great pleasure that we were recognized as the Snowflake Partner of the Year in the Data Engineering Category. The award, which recognizes Qlik Data Integration, was a highpoint in our growing strategic alliance with Snowflake over the year to help companies modernize analytics in the cloud. We’ve continued to enhance customers’ ability to maximize their use of Snowflake and Qlik together through increased product integration and alignment across companies’ data and analytics platforms.

Expansion of Strategic Partnership With Google Cloud
We deepened our strategic partnership with Google Cloud with a new joint offering focused on enabling customers to increase the value of their SAP data with Google BigQuery. Optimized to support SAP data on Google Cloud and Google BigQuery, and reinforced with Qlik’s new ‘SAP on Google Cloud Expertise’ designation, Google Cloud customers have an integrated solution they can confidently deploy with Qlik Data Integration to help drive more use and value from all their data.

We Expanded Our Partnership With Databricks
Databricks, one of our strategic partners, announced an expansion of their solution to include SQL Analytics. The new capability, designed to support BI and reporting needs of organizations, provides SQL users a familiar interface in Databricks to help build dashboards and analyze data with ease; and is backed by a new highly price performant, vectorized engine, tuned specifically for SQL workloads, for faster time to insights. Qlik has integrated the capability to provide SQL users in Databricks easy access to data and an optimized BI experience.

J.B. Hunt: Delivering Real-time Data With Qlik
After evaluating its data pipelines, team members of J.B. Hunt 360 – J.B. Hunt’s technology solution – pinpointed the need to accelerate the flow of data into its Azure Databricks data lake to ensure that J.B. Hunt 360 users maintained a quality experience with no performance lag. Using Qlik Data Integration, issues can now be proactively targeted, ensuring that J.B. Hunt 360 users can leverage the data needed to make critical business decisions. This enables J.B. Hunt to further its company-wide digital transformation and modernization journey.

Blendr.io Acquisition
Late in the year we acquired Blendr.io., an easy-to-use, scalable and secure embedded integration and automation platform that will expand our ability to deliver on our vision of Active Intelligence, where real-time, up-to-date data triggers immediate action to accelerate business value across the entire data and analytics supply chain. With Blendr.io, Qlik customers will more easily automate the integration of data from SaaS apps and cloud sources into their established processes and other SaaS applications for more impactful insights and action.

Synchronized Qlik Data Integration Release
April saw our first synchronized release of Qlik’s Data Integration Platform products – all branded under the Qlik Data Integration Platform. This release included many new enhancements that continue to streamline the process of providing analytics-ready data for faster business insights. We made updates to major products across the platform, including: Qlik Enterprise Manager, Qlik Replicate, Qlik Compose for Data Warehouses, Qlik Compose for Data Lakes and Qlik Catalog.

Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant
Gartner recognized us as a Challenger in the latest Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, giving us high marks for being proven in data replication scenarios, ease of use and automation, and market momentum. This is yet another proof-point that Qlik’s modern approach to data integration is unique in addressing the challenges of organizations that are rapidly moving data and analytics to the cloud.
From acquisitions, to partnerships, product updates and more, Qlik Data Integration enjoyed an incredible 2020. And we have quite a few irons in the fire for 2021. Stay tuned and keep a look out for what 2021 will bring.

Dan Potter is VP of Product Marketing at Attunity – a division of Qlik.