I spent some time recently delving into QlikView’s automation functions, which allow users to write macros to control various activities. These are an important and powerful part of QlikView, since they let it function as a real business application rather than a passive reporting system. But what the experience really did was clarify why QlikView is so much easier to use than traditional software. Specifically, it highlighted the difference between QlikView’s own scripting language and the VBScript used to write QlikView macros. I was going...
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Friday, 25 January 2008
It was Alterian's turn this week in my continuing tour of marketing automation vendors. As I’ve mentioned before, Alterian has pursued a relatively quiet strategy of working through partners—largely marketing services providers (MSPs)—instead of trying to sell their software directly to corporate marketing departments. This makes great sense because their proprietary database engine, which uses very powerful columnar indexes, is a tough sell to corporate IT groups who prefer more traditional technology. Service agencies are more willing to discard...
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Loyal readers will recall a series of posts before New Years providing updates on the major marketing automation vendors: SAS, Teradata, and Unica. I spoke Aprimo around the same time, but had some follow-up questions that were deferred due to the holidays. Now I have my answers, so now you get your post.Aprimo, if you’re not familiar with them, is a bit different from the other marketing automation companies because its has always focused on marketing administration—that is, planning, budgeting, project management and marketing asset management....
Thursday, 10 January 2008
Appearances to the contrary, I do have work to do. But in reflecting on yesterday's post, I did think of one more way to present the impact of QlikTech (or any other software) on an existing environment. This version shows the net change in percentage of answers provided by each user role for each activity type. It definitely shows which roles gain capacity and which have their workload reduced. What I particularly like here is that the detail...
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
As anyone who knows me would have expected, I couldn't resist figuring out how to draw and post the chart I described last week to illustrate the benefits of QlikTech.The mechanics are no big deal, but getting it to look right took some doing. I started with a simple version of the table I described in the earlier post, a matrix comparing business intelligence questions (tasks) vs. the roles of the people who can answer them. Per Friday's post,...
Friday, 4 January 2008
I’ve been planning for about a month to write about the position of QlikTech in the larger market for business intelligence systems. The topic has come up twice in the past week, so I guess I should do it already.First, some context. I’m using “business intelligence” in the broad sense of “how companies get information to run their businesses”. This encompasses everything from standard operational reports to dashboards to advanced data analysis. Since these are all important, you can think of business intelligence as providing a complete solution...
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