Weave Fabric Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from PixabayQlik has launched Cloud Data Integration. It describes it as an enterprise Integration as a Service platform (eIPaaS). The Cloud Data Integration is the fabric that enables Qlik Cloud to have real-time access to data from enterprise applications such as relational databases, SAP, mainframes, and SaaS applications with data repositories such as Snowflake Data Cloud, Azure Synapse, Google Big Query and Databricks. It enables Qlik solutions to have real-time access to data from across these sources, powering its analytics engine to provide insights for enterprises.

James Fisher, Chief Product Officer at Qlik
James Fisher, Chief Product Officer at Qlik

James Fisher, Chief Product Officer at Qlik, commented, “Improving the access, real-time movement, and advanced transformation of data between sources and systems across the enterprise is crucial to organizations realizing the full power of their data. Qlik Cloud Data Integration helps create that real-time fabric between any data source, target and destination, leveraging the power of the cloud to enable everyone in the enterprise to act with certainty through data.”

What is Cloud Data Integration

Cloud Data Integration consists of four SaaS services.

Real-time data movement: No matter where data is held in the enterprise, the Qlik data fabric enables organisations to create pipelines to continuously ingest data without the manual intervention of ETL processes.

Data Transformation: No pipeline is complete without the transformation element. The platform uses autogenerated push-down SQL with a no-code interface to ensure that data is transformed into dimensional models or custom formats.

Application Automation: This no-code visual editor enables organisations to create events that trigger context-aware downstream processes. The no-code platform removes the need to interact directly with application APIs. The orchestration ensures that the data is in place for analysis.

Catalogue and Lineage: These capabilities enable organisations to understand the origin, evolution and meaning of the data across the data fabric. Users can surface field-level information and create personalised tags, properties, and business metadata for greater utilization. The catalogue includes a search function for data users to locate and surface data they require.

Data Architecture: The Cloud Data Integration architecture is scalable, secure and easily maintained compared to traditional IPaaS solutions.

Stewart Bond, Vice President, Data Intelligence and Integration Software research at IDC, notes, “Cloud data integration technologies and services are a critical component of managing data pipelines and downstream analytics use cases in the modern data environment. Qlik’s set of technology services provide users with data access and integration capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud platforms, enabling management of modern data to activate data and analytics.”

Why is this important

Qlik commissioned a study by GigaOM entitled “The Business Case for Data Fabric”. It looks at the benefits and return on investment that a data fabric such as the Qlik eIPaaS can deliver. Key findings include:

  • Reduce data engineer and IT FTE workloads by 25% by aggregating massive amounts of data from multiple sources.
  • Save 65 to 70% of data analyst and engineer data discovery, analysis and implementation time.
  • Recognize data management efficiency increases of 20% in year two and 33% in year three.
  • Realize data integration and governance benefits of 60% in year two and 25% in year three.
  • Organisations can expect to see value within 90 days of integrating all primary data. The payback should be achieved within the first year, with full realization of ROI in 18 to 24 months.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

The Qlik Cloud Data Integration extend the Qlik analytics platform upstream. The solution combines some of the functionality the company gained in acquiring Big Squid (no-code automated machine learning) and NodeGraph (customizable metadata management).

With the announcement, Qlik has evolved from just a BI provider to cover the enterprise data requirements of any organisation. It will aim to cross-sell the solution to existing customers using Qlik analytics but only using traditional data collection methods. What will be interesting is how those data management companies respond. Will they look to acquire an analytics solution to extend their platform?

This big announcement might create further excitement around the IPO that it mooted back in January. It may be that now this announcement has been made, those plans will accelerate. Certainly, since January, there has been little further talk about the IPO. Will that now change?

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