Here’s why Qlik bought Podium Data
Big data analytics is big business. More than 20 vendors want a piece of the pie. There are the well known, much loved platform providers like Microsoft (Power BI) and Tableau who often overshadow Qlik, even though it ranks aside them as a leader in analyst reports such as Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms and the Forrester Wave for Enterprise BI Platforms . And there are the ambitious-up-and-comers like Looker and Domo, though the latter may be a disaster.
That being said, Qlik may soon be giving Tableau and Microsoft a run for their money. Earlier this week Radnor, Pa.-based Qlik announced that it has acquired Lowell, MA — based Podium Data, a maker of data fabric technology. According to Forrester, data fabric helps enterprises accelerate “insights by automating ingestion, curation, discovery, preparation, and integration from data silos.”
Once Podium Data’s data preparation, data quality and data catalog features become integrated with Qlik’s visual data discovery and analytics capabilities, Qlik will have an end-to-end Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics platform which enterprise buyers increasingly prefer according to Boris Evelson, vice president and principal analyst Forrester Research.
If Qlik is able to deliver on the integration, it will help:
- Eliminate the need to use one product for data cataloging and data prep and a separate one for BI and Analytics
- Bring together data scattered across application and database silos as the divide between BI and data lake technologies
- Bring “intelligent data profiling and onboarding” tools to its Data Hub (“ a one stop shop for all your data needs”)
- Bring democratized data access and auto-masking of sensitive data to Qlik
Qlik is not alone in this approach. In the past year its competitors have made similar acquisitions:
- Tableau bought Empirical Systems in June
- Google acquired Cask Data in May
- Salesforce acquired Datorama last week
- Oracle acquired DataScience.com in May
Who do these acquisitions hurt? Potentially vendors like Cloudera which is staking an important part of its future on “Big Data, Analytics, Cloud” as well as Hortonworks which is trying to enter this market.
