7 Reasons to Switch to Qlik SaaS Right Now

For several years now, Qlik has offered its software as Software as a Service (SaaS) via its Qlik Cloud platform. At first glance, the trusted old (on-premise) "Client-managed" variant and the new Qlik SaaS variant look very similar. They run on the same powerful QIX engine and both offer the ability to build dashboards and self-service BI. Yet it's also worthwhile for existing Qlik Sense Client Managed users to consider switching to Qlik SaaS. In this blog we give you our top 7 reasons to do so.

#1 Qlik SaaS is easily scalable

Data-driven working is developing enormously. For several years now, all the experts have been saying that data is the new gold. This means that within your organization you'll notice that the demand for good tools to gain insight from that data grows every day. Unfortunately, more users directly means a bigger load on the hardware and IT infrastructure that your on-premise Qlik environment runs on. Of course, you can also scale up on-premise Qlik environments by adding new hardware, but that requires extra investment, time, and know-how. Nothing is as frustrating as having to slow down or postpone a project for a new dashboard because the hardware isn't ready for it yet.

With Qlik SaaS, the infrastructure is organized by Qlik itself. All you need to do to expand usage is give new users access and assign them a license. This makes you very flexible, and you can scale up or down at any time depending on what the organization needs. This means you can spend more time developing new data products!

#2 The newest features always available immediately

Know the feeling? You've just seen a demo of a new feature and your hands are itching to get started with it. Finally you can solve that problem you've been struggling with for ages. Unfortunately, the software first needs to be updated for that. And that takes time — the management team has to fit it into their busy schedule, after which the release first has to be thoroughly tested before it's finally available in production, months later.

With Qlik SaaS, Qlik makes sure the software is always up to date. So the newest features are always immediately available. And that's just as well, because since the introduction of Qlik SaaS, Qlik's development team has been working at a fast pace, adding new functionality to the platform every 2 weeks. An added benefit is that the platform is also always immediately equipped with the latest security updates, which better manages cyber security risk too.

#3 Put your data to work with Qlik Application Automation

We previously wrote a blog about the possibilities of Qlik Application Automation. With this new feature, you can not only integrate Qlik seamlessly with all your other software systems via APIs and webhooks, it also enables you to take direct 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 set up a task in the CRM system for the account manager to call that customer.

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

#4 Always stay up to date with the latest updates with Qlik Alerts and Subscriptions

A good dashboard is only valuable if it's actually being looked at. The problem, however, is that your users have to actively log in to the dashboard to retrieve their information. Often the situation doesn't change all that much from one day to the next, so you see roughly the same figures. Over time, you'll then see that use of the dashboard decreases and it's consulted less frequently. A shame, because this also means people respond much less quickly 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 such a subscription, depending on your own choice, you get an email every day, week, or month containing the page from a dashboard in PDF format and a link to the up-to-date dashboard.

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

#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 wasn'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 allows you to compile reports based on one or more dashboards and send them to internal and external recipients in various ways. What makes the reporting service extra powerful is the combination with application automation, which lets you handle even the most complex scenarios. Does your customer want to receive their weekly inventory overview only if stock falls below a certain value, sent to a different recipient depending on the month, and then by email one week and as a message in Teams or as a file over FTP the next? With the combination of the reporting service and application automation, you can set this up in no time. Want to know exactly how? Read the blog we wrote about this here.

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

As a data-driven organization, you're constantly developing new dashboards and making data sources available to the rest of your colleagues. The danger is always lurking that your colleagues can no longer see the wood for the trees, and therefore don't know that a dashboard or dataset already exists that answers all their questions. With the Qlik Catalog, you make 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 through using search terms and filters. For every object, they can see who the owner is and who created it, so they always know who to contact if they have questions or if something is wrong with, for example, the 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's used further downstream. In addition, for the dedicated self-service user, the data profiling capability is also very powerful. With data profiling, you can analyze the characteristics of the data in a dataset before loading it into your dashboard. You can see which columns are in a dataset, what data type those columns contain (for example, text values, dates, or numeric values), how many blank and unique values that column contains, and a number of sample values from that column. Qlik also automatically generates a number of visualizations, depending on the column's characteristics, that quickly give insight into, for example, the distribution of values across the entire set.

#7 With Qlik SaaS you're prepared for the future

With the launch of Qlik SaaS, Qlik has also set itself a new pace of development. New features are added to the platform every 2 weeks. With the client-managed variant, we see a much lower development pace, focused on a new release each quarter. We saw a similar strategy with QlikView compared to Qlik Sense. There's no need to panic right away, since Qlik still supports and maintains even QlikView, but it's clear that Qlik will be fully committing to the SaaS variant in the coming years. Not a crazy 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 therefore directly aligning with market trends.

You can therefore assume that in the coming period, Qlik SaaS will keep developing faster than the client-managed variant. In addition, we see that many of Qlik's add-ons and acquisitions are finding their way to the cloud platform. For example, many features of application automation, catalog, and alerting are direct integrations of the previously acquired add-ons Blendr.io, Podium Data, Nodegraph, and RoxAI. These features are often integrated directly into the cloud platform and only later — or sometimes never — made available for the client-managed variant. With Qlik SaaS, you're also in the front row for all new applications.

Ready to get started with Qlik SaaS?

Have you become completely enthusiastic about trying out Qlik SaaS? E-mergo is happy to help with that. Want to see the features mentioned above in action? Request a (no-obligation) demo here. Not entirely sure yet whether the step to SaaS fits your existing environment? We can help you with an impact analysis and think along about a suitable approach. Note that many of the limitations we wrote about regarding Qlik SaaS last year have since been resolved. For example, with application automation you can now reload your dashboards more often than once an hour, with the reporting service you can now cover much of the NPrinting functionality, and with Qlik Forts you have more control over where your data is stored. In short, now is the moment to switch to Qlik SaaS!

Written by Lennaert van den Brink
Senior Consultant