QlikTech International AB (Qlik), a foundational self-service business intelligence (BI) player based in Radnor, Pennsylvania, today announced its acquisition of Lowell, Massachusetts-based data management startup Podium data. The deal closed on Friday and was announced to employees yesterday. The two companies made the deal public today.
The tie-up gives Qlik serious data preparation, data quality and data catalog capabilities to add to its hallmark visual data discovery and analytics offering. Once tighter integration is achieved, the deal will effectively transform Qlik into an end-to-end data platform.
PhilosophyIn an interview today with Michael Capone, CEO of Qlik and Paul Barth, CEO of Podium Data, I got some insight into the philosophy behind this deal: eliminating fragmentation. Right now, a lot of Enterprise customers are talking a best-of-breed approach to analytics, using standalone products for data preparation, data quality processing, data cataloging and curation, and, of course, visual analytics.
Add to that complexity the issue of data being scattered across so many database and application silos as well as the divide between BI and Data Lake technologies, and successful analytics implementations face a lot of hurdles. The Qlik-Podium union addresses many of these.
Keeping up with the BI Joneses Let's be honest, though. There's a competitive facet to this deal as well. Tableau features its own data preparation capabilities now, in the form of Tableau Prep. Microsoft, through inclusion of Power Query, bundles data prep/transformation capabilities into Power BI and just announced those capabilities will be available in the cloud as well as in Power BI Desktop. Qlik was left somewhat the odd one out, without such capabilities.
Also read: Microsoft reveals new Power BI and Azure Data Warehouse capabilities
But, arguably, this deal lets Qlik leapfrog the competition, not just achieve parity. That's because Podium Data's platform includes data preparation, data quality and data catalog capabilities, including auto-masking of sensitive data. The data catalog is searchable and is based on a "shop for data" paradigm. Its philosophy is that by combining these capabilities, the platform enables businesses to get their data to analysis-ready state and then allow users to to find and use relevant data sets on a self-service basis.
