With over 25 years in data and advanced analytics, Qlik helps enterprises move faster, work smarter, and lead the way forward with end-to-end solutions for getting value out of data. The company’s vision is a data-literate world in which every organization can use its data to improve decision-making and solve the most challenging business problems. In partnership with Microsoft, Qlik is empowering organizations to achieve more.

Qlik does business in over 100 countries, serving over 50,000 customers. With the acquisition of Attunity in 2019, Qlik expanded its portfolio with innovative data integration technology and expertise to help organizations overcome the complex challenges of quickly transforming data into business value. The Qlik Data Integration platform (formerly Attunity) is the optimal solution for organizations looking to make data available for analytics or modernize their data estate on Microsoft Azure.

By deploying Qlik Data Integration, Azure customers can automate and stream data from a variety of sources into various Azure data services quickly, easily, and securely. Together, Qlik and Microsoft are accelerating data analysis, combining the automated data-delivery capabilities of the Qlik solution with the agility and openness of the Microsoft Azure platform to enable data modernization initiatives.

Qlik Data Integration makes it possible to deliver real-time data at volume to any Azure artificial intelligence and advanced analytics service. A company’s data becomes available on a single platform, where it can be truly useful: easily accessible for exploring, sharing, and making strategic decisions. Qlik and Microsoft technologies empower business decision makers—and everyone in an organization—to make discoveries that lead to measurable outcomes and transformative change.

Better data for faster decisions

More organizations are turning to the cloud as a solution for analytics where they can build modern data platforms, including data warehouses or data lakes, as well as innovative analytic solutions that enable AI using real-time data. The practical benefit of this important development is greater business agility with faster time to decisions based on more and better data.

“The evolution of analytics capabilities and AI services on Azure is creating more demand for our data integration solution and more ways for customers to benefit from their data,” says Itamar Ankorion, Senior Vice President for Technology Alliances at Qlik. “Now we can create solutions faster across more Azure services to meet our customers’ increasing needs.”

Organizations around the world are looking for ways to modernize their operations and accelerate business value through technologies that can access and integrate data from multiple sources. There’s a growing need to manage large volumes of data stored in multiple legacy sources, to access it easily, and use it to make smarter decisions. Qlik’s strong alliance with Microsoft offers customers more freedom and flexibility to choose where their data is stored, where the analytics take place, and how and where users can access it seamlessly, whether on-premises or in the Azure cloud.

The widespread adoption of Azure cloud technology and the migration of data and applications has been transformative for customers. Organizations are finding significant business value in digital transformation with Qlik and Microsoft solutions, including savings on infrastructure costs and reduced management overhead, plus increased resiliency and agility. Azure AI and advanced analytics enable such business outcomes with faster time to both insight and decision-making, plus accelerated business growth and profitability.

The availability of AI and advanced analytics services on Azure is driving customer demand to use these capabilities to improve business outcomes. Azure AI-enabled predictive models, for example, analyze patterns in historical data and detect the learned patterns in new data to improve growth and productivity, transform jobs and businesses, and contribute to meaningful financial benefits.

“Something we're seeing in today's analytics environment that’s very different than before—and I'm talking about customer expectations and needs—is agility,” says Ankorion. “Organizations need to move much faster. The cloud gives them that opportunity, which we complement with our data warehouse automation solutions, enabling enterprises to accelerate time to value and iterate faster to deliver business value.”

Qlik is helping customers integrate data and deliver it faster in a way that’s fit for purpose, often in real time, to take advantage of insight, visualization, and prediction across the range of Azure AI and analytics services.

A partnership delivering success to customers

Qlik’s strategic alliance with Microsoft goes back many years to serving customers’ on-premises database, integration, and analytic needs. The partnership has evolved to facilitate customers’ digital transformation to the cloud and their data modernization initiatives. The company values Microsoft for its global customer ecosystem and best-in-class, enterprise-ready cloud technologies, as well as for its partner focus.

“Microsoft is a great partner,” says Kevin Pardue, Director, Global Microsoft Alliance at Qlik. “Partnering is in their DNA. Microsoft has excellent partner programs with resources and tools for us to be successful in bringing value to our mutual customers.”

From collaborative product work to go-to-market and sales for modernizing customers’ analytics platform to Azure, Qlik has proven itself as a highly trusted Microsoft partner and received the 2019 MSUS Partner Award for Intelligent Cloud–Data Estate Modernization.

Customers want assurance that the products they use are validated to optimally work in an Azure environment. Qlik has collaborated very closely with numerous Azure product teams to ensure that it not only supports key Azure services, but that the Qlik integrations are performant for the demands of customers.

Qlik’s portfolio of solutions aligns especially well with Microsoft’s value proposition; its customers are adopting and embracing Azure as the fast-growing, secure, and future-ready cloud.

Helping every customer make better use of data

The Qlik Data Integration platform is designed for practically endless uses to drive insight and innovate decision-making across multiple industries and job functions.

An example of a recent customer win is the challenge of disconnected data that Qlik addressed for Save the Children, a leading global humanitarian organization. Fundraising is the lifeline of the organization’s daily operations, but its efforts were being hampered by siloed data. The organization’s leaders had difficulty gaining a holistic view of the state of their organizational performance and were unable to consistently make decisions based on a single source of truth.

Qlik deployed its real-time data integration solution to bring together data from multiple sources, including ERP and CRM systems. Paired with Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Synapse Analytics, Qlik modernized Save the Children’s data estate, giving fundraisers a real-time view of their outreach efforts and accelerating fundraising by enabling insights previously not possible to achieve.

Azure Data Lake is a scalable data storage and analytics service. Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It gives an organization the freedom to query data on its terms, using either serverless or dedicated resources at scale.

For Ferguson Enterprises, North America’s leading value-added distributor of plumbing and heating products, the Qlik Data Integration platform enabled the re-architecture of a legacy data platform that had been effectively rendered obsolete by the company’s rapid market expansion and multiple acquisitions. In the first 100-day sprint, Qlik enabled the rapid ingestion of data to Azure Data Lake and Azure Synapse.

Then, in the first six months of the engagement, Qlik migrated 27 databases—Oracle and others— followed by dozens more. The result for Ferguson of automating traditional data warehousing tasks has been dramatically improved time to value for the business and a significant reduction of costs.

“Our evolving partnership and joint go-to-market with Qlik is centered around creating superior business value for customers,” says Simran Sachar, Director of Analytics, AI & Industry, Global Partner Solutions. “The stronger Qlik data-integration capabilities with Azure, Azure Synapse, and Microsoft Power BI is helping customers unlock new insights and realize business value faster.”

Innovation and growth ahead

Qlik’s journey to enabling customers on cloud technologies has been very dynamic and rewarding. Looking ahead, the company sees continued growth in its focus on delivering real-time, continuously changing data to help customers solve business problems. Its partnership with Microsoft assures a promising roadmap of innovation and growth.

Opportunities in automation and simplification are also expanding, especially migrating workloads to Azure and automating tasks that previously required coding and other engineering skills. “We’re listening to our customers, making sure we understand what they are trying to achieve on their transformation journeys,” says Ankorion. “It’s also important for us to remain aligned with Microsoft and understand where they are heading and why. They are always interested in hearing from us about where we’re heading and why. Our partnership is transforming and increasing the value we bring to customers.”

Qlik will develop and deliver more integration solutions and capabilities. An early adopter of the cloud and Azure AI and advanced analytics, Qlik will continue its partnership and innovation with Microsoft. Better together, Qlik and Microsoft are delivering transformative solutions to customers, helping every organization find greater value in its data.