7 reasons to switch to Qlik SaaS now

For several years now, Qlik has offered its software as Software as a Service (SaaS) through its Qlik Cloud platform. At first glance, the familiar (on-premise) “Client-managed” version and the new Qlik SaaS version look very much alike. They run on the same powerful QIX engine and both let you build dashboards and enable self-service BI. Even so, switching to Qlik SaaS is worth considering for existing Qlik Sense Client Managed users too. In this blog we share our top 7 reasons to make the move.

#1 Qlik SaaS scales easily

Data-driven working is evolving rapidly. For years, experts have been saying that data is the new gold. In practice, this means your organisation will see the demand for good tools to make that data insightful grow every day. Unfortunately, more users immediately means a heavier load on the hardware and IT infrastructure your on-premise Qlik environment runs on. Of course, you can scale on-premise Qlik environments by adding new hardware, but that takes extra investment, time and know-how. Nothing is more frustrating than having to slow down or postpone a new dashboard project because the hardware isn't ready for it yet.

With Qlik SaaS, the infrastructure is managed by Qlik itself. All you need to do to expand usage is give new users access and assign them a licence. This makes you very flexible: you can scale up or down at any time, as your organisation requires. That leaves you more time to develop new data products!

#2 The latest features, always available straight away

Sound familiar? You've just seen a demo of a new feature and you can't wait to get started with it. Finally, you can solve that problem you've been struggling with for ages. Unfortunately, the software has to be updated first. And that takes time: the management team has to fit it into its busy schedule, after which the release needs to be tested thoroughly before it finally becomes available in production months later.

With Qlik SaaS, Qlik makes sure the software is always up to date. That means the newest features are always available immediately. And that's a good thing, because since the introduction of Qlik SaaS, Qlik's development team has been working at a rapid pace, adding new functionality to the platform every 2 weeks. An added benefit is that the platform always has the latest security updates straight away, so cyber security risks are better under control as well.

#3 Put your data to work with Qlik Application Automation

We previously wrote a blog about the possibilities of Qlik Application Automation. This new feature not only lets you integrate Qlik seamlessly with all your other software systems using APIs and webhooks, it also enables you to take immediate action based on your data. For example, send a message straight to the account manager when a new high-potential customer enters the system, and immediately create a task in the CRM system for the account manager to call that customer.

On top of that, Qlik Application Automation lets you automate a whole range of daily management tasks and development work, and it even makes it possible to ask users of your dashboard for input. You get the first 5,000 automation starts per month for free with your Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS environment, so you can get started right away!

#4 Always up to date with Qlik Alerts and Subscriptions

A good dashboard is only valuable if people actually look at it. The problem, however, is that your users have to actively log in to the dashboard to get their information. Often the situation hasn't changed much from one day to the next, so you see roughly the same numbers. Over time, dashboard usage declines and it gets consulted less and less often. That's a shame, because it also means people respond much more slowly when the situation does suddenly change, and valuable time is lost. With Qlik Alerts and Subscriptions, you bring the dashboard to the user.

Users can decide for themselves whether they want to subscribe to a dashboard. With a subscription, you receive an email every day, week or month, depending on your preference, containing the dashboard page as a PDF and a link to the live dashboard.

Alerts take things a step further. A subscription sends you a PDF of the entire dashboard at fixed intervals, but sometimes you only want to be notified when a certain threshold is crossed. Think of a warning when the profit margin drops below target, or a notification when new high-priority tickets are logged in the incident system. An alert lets you, as an end user, set up these kinds of warnings yourself. Here too, you receive an email or push notification with the information from the alert and a link to the dashboard. It's a very powerful feature that gives data-driven working and the adoption of your dashboards a huge boost.

#5 Send reports to all your internal and external recipients

For a long time, one of the drawbacks of Qlik SaaS was that the NPrinting add-on isn't available for the Qlik SaaS edition. With the introduction of the Qlik Reporting Service, a large part of NPrinting's functionality is now available in Qlik SaaS. The Reporting Service lets you compile reports based on one or more dashboards and send them to internal and external recipients in various ways. What makes the Reporting Service especially powerful is its combination with Application Automation, which allows you to handle even the most complex scenarios. Does your customer only want to receive their weekly stock overview when stock falls below a certain level, sent to a different recipient depending on the month, and delivered by email one week and as a Teams message or a file over FTP the next? With the combination of the Reporting Service and Application Automation, you can set it up in no time. Want to know exactly how? Read the blog we wrote about it here.

#6 Searching for data becomes finding data with the Qlik Catalog

As a data-driven organisation, you are constantly developing new dashboards and making data sources available to your colleagues. The danger is always that your colleagues can no longer see the wood for the trees, and so don't realise there is already a dashboard or dataset that answers all their questions. The Qlik Catalog makes it very easy for all users to search through the available data.

Metadata is stored for every object available in Qlik SaaS, which users can easily search using search terms and filters. For each object they can see who owns it and who created it, so they always know who to contact if they have questions or if something is wrong, for example with data quality.

In addition to the search function, the catalog also provides insight into the data lineage of a dashboard or dataset. This means you can see exactly where a dataset comes from and where it is used further downstream. For the keen self-service user, the data profiling capability is also very powerful. Data profiling lets you analyse the characteristics of the data in a dataset before loading it into your dashboard. You can see which columns a dataset contains, what data type those columns hold (for example text values, dates or numbers), how many empty and unique values each column contains, and a number of sample values from that column. Qlik also automatically generates a number of visualisations, depending on the characteristics of the column, that give quick insight into things like the distribution of values across the whole set.

#7 Qlik SaaS prepares you for the future

With the launch of Qlik SaaS, Qlik has also adopted a new pace of development. New features are added to the platform every 2 weeks. The client-managed version sees a much slower pace of development, with a new release targeted every quarter. We saw a similar strategy with QlikView compared to Qlik Sense. There's no need to panic straight away, as even QlikView is still supported and maintained by Qlik, but it is clear that Qlik will be going all-in on the SaaS version in the coming years. Not a strange choice: research firm Gartner recently predicted that by 2026, more than 45% of all IT spending will go to cloud services and systems. With its cloud-first strategy, Qlik is aligning directly with market trends.

So you can expect Qlik SaaS to develop increasingly faster than the client-managed version in the period ahead. We also see many of Qlik's add-ons and acquisitions finding their way to the cloud platform. For instance, many features of Application Automation, Catalog and Alerting are direct integrations of the previously acquired add-ons Blendr.io, Podium Data, Nodegraph and RoxAI. In most cases these features are integrated into the cloud platform first and only made available for the client-managed version later, or sometimes not at all. With Qlik SaaS, you have a front-row seat for all new applications too.

Getting started with Qlik SaaS?

Are you now excited to try Qlik SaaS? E-mergo is happy to help. If you'd like to see the features above in action, request a (no-obligation) demo here. Not quite sure yet whether the move to SaaS suits your existing environment? We can help you with an impact analysis and think along with you about a suitable approach. Note that many of the limitations we wrote about Qlik SaaS last year have since been resolved. With Application Automation you can now reload your dashboards more often than once an hour, the Reporting Service covers a large part of NPrinting's functionality, and Qlik Forts gives you more control over where your data is stored. In short, now is the time to switch to Qlik SaaS!