Qlik Connect 2024: Highlights and Key Takeaways

Known for its sunny weather, Orlando, Florida, recently hosted one of the largest events in the data integration, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) world: Qlik Connect. This conference gathered data experts, data enthusiasts, partners, and tech companies from around the globe, all working with Qlik. Attendees had the opportunity to participate in dynamic keynotes, specialized breakout sessions, and an expansive expo hall showcasing innovative and transformative technologies from various Qlik partners.

The event provided a hands-on experience with the latest advancements in data, AI, cloud computing, and more, offering valuable insights into cutting-edge technologies and the ever-evolving landscape of data visualization.

While this is just a high-level overview of the spectacular event, here’s what our team brought back from the trip:

Product Updates

Qlik Answers

An out-of-the-box, generative AI-powered knowledge assistant that transforms how businesses access and utilize unstructured data. It delivers reliable, personalized answers from companies’ private, curated sources such as knowledge libraries and document repositories, ensuring instant, relevant insights. Fully plug-and-play and self-service, it integrates seamlessly into existing systems, enabling workers to make informed decisions in real-time. With full explainability, users know the origin of answers, maintaining trust and transparency. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been a topic of fascination and apprehension, thanks in part to popular culture. However, as we advance deeper into the technological era, AI is becoming an integral part of daily business operations, driving success across various industries. Qlik is positioning itself to be at the forefront of this transformation, revolutionizing how users utilize AI to manage data. We think this technology enhances AI readiness, enabling users to track and manage data more effectively and integrate it seamlessly into business decisions. Qlik Answers also allows for personalized queries, ensuring that users receive precise responses tailored to their specific challenges. 

Qlik Talend Cloud

A comprehensive, integrated platform evolving from Qlik's 2023 acquisition of Talend, introducing new capabilities such as data products for faster, quality-assured data curation and a dynamic data marketplace to enhance the delivery of domain-specific data across the organization. It offers modern data engineering tools with a spectrum of powerful transformation capabilities from no-code to pro-code options, creating trusted AI-ready data for complex AI projects. The platform's unified packaging and pricing ensure affordability, while its Qlik Talend Trust Score™ for AI uniquely assesses data health, setting a new standard in AI readiness. The solution incorporates Stitch's SaaS data connectivity, enhancing its capability to handle diverse data sources efficiently. 

Imagine having a tool that seamlessly integrates AI augmentation into your daily coding tasks. Coding and building data pipelines can be time-consuming, but this tool simplifies the process significantly. Users can specify the type of code they need, and the program will generate it automatically. Additionally, this platform integrates with leading cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, AWS, Microsoft Fabric, and more. This functionality not only accelerates coding tasks but also ensures compatibility with major cloud services, streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency.

AWS Partnership

As Qlik continues to grow, its partnerships are expanding as well. A key development is Qlik's new partnership with AWS, which enhances Qlik's capabilities with AWS's robust cloud infrastructure and advanced technologies. This integration supports Qlik's sales and marketing strategies, strengthening its position as a leading data platform. By leveraging AWS, Qlik can offer innovative, scalable, and secure solutions to address modern data challenges.

In a recent press release, Qlik shared that the plan is for Qlik and AWS to collaborate on a series of strategic initiatives, each designed to provide specific benefits across four key areas:

• Drive AI App Development: The SCA will accelerate collaborative innovation that enables customers to derive value from generative AI applications including seamless integrations with AWS generative AI services, such as Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies via a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities organizations need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.
  
  
• Enhance SAP Data Utilization: The collaboration will allow customers to gain greater value from their SAP data by migrating their data environments, enabling modern solutions that leverage Qlik’s broad data integration capabilities for both SAP and non-SAP data sources.
  
  
• Streamline Data Compliance: The collaboration will further enable compliance, privacy, and sovereignty requirements across additional AWS Regions. This will support customer migration and innovation while enabling adherence to critical regulatory standards such as FedRAMP in the United States.  
  
  
• Accelerate AI Technology Adoption: Qlik and AWS will intensify co-marketing and co-selling efforts with investments designed to accelerate customer success with trusted enterprise AI.  
  
  

Key Sessions

During the Qlik Connect conference, several sessions significantly impacted attendees by providing valuable insights into the company's future and upcoming technological advancements. These informative events offered practical tips, strategies, and much more. Here are some key takeaways from a few standout sessions:

Unlock Your Data Potential: Integrating Qlik Cloud with GenAI: This session demonstrated how combining Qlik Cloud's powerful analytics capabilities with GenAI's advanced artificial intelligence can transform data into actionable decisions. Some key takeaways included:

• Techniques for seamless integration of Qlik Cloud and GenAI.
• Leveraging AI-driven data analysis to enhance decision-making processes.
• Hands-on experience in maximizing data utility for driving business growth through innovative technology solutions.

Top Trends: Bridge the Trust Gap from Big to Better Data: Participants explored the latest methodologies and technologies to ensure data reliability and accuracy. Key takeaways include:

• Strategies to transform vast quantities of raw data into trusted, high-quality insights.
• Practical insights into addressing common challenges in data integrity.
• Building and maintaining data trust to make informed business decisions and drive confidence in data-driven initiatives.
  
  

These impactful sessions exemplified the wealth of knowledge shared at Qlik Connect, empowering attendees with actionable insights and strategies to drive meaningful change and innovation within their organizations.

Qlik Connect in Orlando left an irreplaceable mark on the data world. It will serve as a spark for companies to embrace the power of the data cloud, harness the potential of Artificial Intelligence, and blast off into the future for their data strategies.