Good Look at QlikView from a Microstrategy Consultant's Viewpoint

I noticed some visitors this morning from the blog of Microstrategy consultancy Aellament, and found they have published a nice look at QlikView on their blog. It's worth a read, and quite interesting in their appreciation of the advantages that QlikView offers over the product they know best. They fairly point out some disadvantages too, of which I think lack of a unified metadata view is probably most significant.

What really resonated was Aellament's sense (in an earlier blog post, which contains the link back to this blog) that QlikView is empowering departmental users to do work that otherwise takes support from technical specialists. That's exactly what I've seen as QlikView's advantage and I think it's fundamentally reshaping the industry.

As I see the future, BI specialists will still be needed to assemble source data into usable forms (i.e., build the data warehouses). This has always been the heavy lifting. But the huge army of people who then essentially reformat that data into cubes, reports, dashboards, etc. will dwindle as business analysts do that for themselves using tools like QlikView. Bad news for Microstrategy consultants (presumably why Aellament is hedging its bets with QlikView training) but good news for business users.