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Qlik To Be Acquired by Private Equity Firm Thoma Bravo

Qlik has announced it has entered into an agreement with private equity firm Thoma Bravo to be acquired by them for around 3 billion USD.

Author: Carsten Bange

Published: 30 June 2016

Qlik announced at the beginning of June that it has entered into an agreement with private equity firm Thoma Bravo to be acquired by them for ~3 billion USD. Qlik, founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden and now headquartered in Radnor, PA, USA has become one of the major BI vendors in the last 15 years: It currently has 2,000 employees, 39,000 customers and 1,700 partners in more than 100 countries, making 612 million USD revenue in 2015. This values Qlik at about 5x revenue and at a similar enterprise value to Tableau, which has surpassed Qlik with very strong growth in recent years, reaching 695 million USD revenue in 2015, but also suffering a 50% stock price plummet in February 2016.

Qlik has appeared to be for sale for a while and the move to de-list from the stock market and become owned by a PE company has become quite normal amongst software vendors: Tibco, Informatica and more recently Dell Software are other prominent examples. 

Qlik’s stock price has remained between 20 and 40 USD for the last 5 years – basically going sideways despite its revenue growth during that period – so its frequent interactions with financial analysts and its large number of shareholders were probably not too pleasant. Qlik has faced some serious challenges in recent years, both organizationally and on the product and marketing side with the transformation from its first product generation (QlikView) to the second generation Qlik Sense. Qlik has returned to calmer waters in the last year since the release of Qlik Sense 2.0 in mid 2015. But its complete transformation to a Cloud software-oriented company is still ongoing, and the freedom to take decisions without the added scrutiny of the stock market might help to re-focus Qlik on business priorities and push it into new areas.

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Cisco Acquires ParStream

Author: Carsten Bange

Published: 27 October 2015

Abstract:
Networking giant Cisco has announced its intent to buy ParStream, a young analytical database vendor based in Germany and the US. This acquisition strengthens Cisco’s ability to build networks with real-time data acquisition and storage “on the edges” of the network in distributed infrastructures.

Click here to download the full article

Chart from The BI Survey 15: Which departments are using BI

Pervasive Business Intelligence: Still A Dream

According to The BI Survey 15, BARC’s detailed annual audit of end-user sentiment on the business intelligence (BI) software market, published today.

PRESS RELEASE – LONDON, 19th October 2015

Pervasive BI: Still a dream

Usage of BI is becoming more pervasive, but remains a long way from being truly widespread in companies, according to The BI Survey 15. Following two years of zero growth, the median percentage of employees using BI in companies increased by more than 2% on last year to over 13%. From a sample of 2,071 responses, 45% of participants say their companies have less than 10% of employees using BI.

Chart from The BI Survey 15: Percentage of BI users in company

Figure 1: Percentage of BI users in company, median percentage, timeline (n=changing basis). Source: The BI Survey 15

“New and emerging use cases – such as the steering and controlling of operational processes – and software buying preferences focused on ease of use, support for more concurrent users and flexibility are among the key drivers for this upturn and future broader acceptance,” said Dr. Carsten Bange, founder and CEO of BARC. “Greater adoption of cloud-based BI deployments in the future could also lead to higher penetration rates thanks to their flexibility and ease of deployment. However, our survey finds that the adoption rate for cloud-based BI solutions is still very low.”

 

Predictive analysis/data mining set for wider usage

Predictive analysis/data mining is only performed by 20% of respondents in this year’s BI Survey, but it stands to see the biggest gain of all BI tasks in the coming years with a further 40% planning to use BI solutions for this purpose.

Chart from The BI Survey 15: Tasks where BI is used

Figure 2: Tasks where BI is used (n=2429). Source: The BI Survey 15

 

Surge of BI usage in production/operations

Chart from The BI Survey 15: Which departments are using BI

Figure 3: Which departments are using BI? Timeline (n=changing basis). Source: The BI Survey 15

Finance (85%), management (68%) and sales (62%) departments continue to be the leading BI users, but there has been surge of BI usage in production/operations (to 51%) in the last two years. If this pattern continues, production/operations could overtake sales and IT to become the third biggest user of the technology within the next three years.

“This finding is a result of the general trend in business intelligence to become more operational,” said Bange. “Reporting and analytical capabilities are embedded in or used in relation to operational processes, either to steer processes as they happen in real time or to understand processes better, for example to improve planning.”

This is just a small selection of the hundreds of findings in The BI Survey 15. Contact us for interview requests or to find out more.

 

About The BI Survey 15
The BI Survey 15 is based on user opinion from over 3,000 BI professionals worldwide about software selection, implementation and usage. Detailed feedback on a record 35 BI products from 30 vendors is analyzed and compared, including international giants IBM, Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL) and SAP, as well as BI specialists such as Information Builders, MicroStrategy (MSTR), Qlik, SAS Institute and Tableau (DATA).

About BARC
BARC is an enterprise software industry analyst delivering product evaluations, conferences, market research and consulting to over 1,000 customers each year. BARC specializes in advising organizations on software selection in its core research areas of business intelligence, data management and enterprise content management.

Along with CXP and Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), BARC forms part of the CXP Group – the leading European IT research and consulting firm with 140 staff in eight countries.

Press contact:
Mark Handford
+ 44 (0)1536 772 451
mhandford@barc-research.com
www.barc-research.com/BI-Survey

departments using big data

Big data analysis shown to increase revenues and reduce costs

Benefits and challenges

Over 40% of companies worldwide analyze big data and many are now enjoying a variety of benefits, according to “Big Data Use Cases 2015 – Getting Real On Data Monetization“, published this week by BARC.

Topping the list of benefits realized from big data analysis are better strategic decisions (69%), improved control of operational processes (54%), better understanding of customers (52%) and cost reductions (47%).

Furthermore, those organizations able to quantify their gains from analyzing big data reported an average 8% increase in revenues and a 10% reduction in costs.

“Big data analysis brings a number of advantages to the table, but the challenges involved should also not be underestimated”, says Dr. Carsten Bange, CEO of BARC and co-author of the study. “Our survey identified data privacy and data security as the two main issues in companies which already have big data initiatives in place.”

The next most cited issue is the lack of internal business and technical know-how for tapping and analyzing big data, leading many companies to say that they intend to create new jobs in this area. According to Dr. Bange, however, the global labor market probably can’t meet their demand for this type of expertise at the moment. “A global skills shortage could really curb the big data boom.”

Management is driving big data

Whether or not big data initiatives thrive in companies depends to a large degree on their management. In companies where big data initiatives are an integrated part of business processes, senior management is the main driver or thought leader (61%). However, in organizations still considering using big data analysis, the corresponding figure is much lower at 34%.

On the whole, business departments are still very passive and much less likely to be the drivers behind this topic.

Customer analysis is the most common project driver

Previous BARC surveys have shown that organizations broaden their range of big data application scenarios as they gain more experience in analyzing big data.

Currently, marketing and sales departments lead the way in big data analysis. Of the survey respondents who are using – or planning to use – big data, 25% said they have already integrated big data analyses in their marketing and 23% in sales.

But big data is by no means confined to these areas: respondents reported plenty of big data use cases in all other departments including production, finance, controlling and human resources.

departments using big data

The unusually high numbers for planned deployments by department (between 34% and 56% overall) suggest that, sooner or later, big data will reach every corner of the business.

Information on the survey

A total of 559 people participated in this survey. 37% came from Germany, Austria and Switzerland with another 22% coming from North America. Respondents represented a wide range of industries, most notably IT (16%), manufacturing (14%), consulting (13%) and retail (8%).

This independent study is available free of charge thanks to sponsorship from Blue Yonder, Cloudera, Hewlett-Packard, Information Builders, pmOne, SAS, Tableau and Teradata.

Click here to download the full study.

About BARC

BARC is an enterprise software industry analyst delivering product evaluations, conferences, market research and consulting to over 1,000 customers each year. BARC specializes in advising organizations on software selection in its core research areas of business intelligence, data management and enterprise content management.

Along with CXP and Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), BARC forms part of the CXP Group – the leading European IT research and consulting firm with 140 staff in eight countries.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Mark Handford
Tel: + 44 (0)1536 772 451
mhandford@barc-research.com

 

BARC Score BI

BARC Score Launched

Business software industry analyst firm BARC today launched BARC Score, a new analyst report evaluating and ranking the key players in the business intelligence (BI) software market.

BARC Score analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of all the leading vendors in the BI market, as well as many of the smaller vendors that often have less visibility but still offer outstanding value to their customers.

“BARC Score provides a quick and clear overview of the BI market based on a combination of thorough analysis of products and vendors by our analysts and detailed end-user feedback”, said Carsten Bange, founder and CEO of BARC. “We are already planning to extend this concept to provide comprehensive ratings of other categories of business software on a regular basis.”

The inaugural BARC Score Business Intelligence report identifies IBM, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Qlik, SAP and SAS as ‘Trendsetters’ in the BI market.

BI Score 2015

“Every vendor is evaluated on two dimensions, Portfolio Capabilities and Market Execution, each representing an axis on the chart above,” explained Andreas Bitterer, VP and Research Fellow at BARC, and originator of the BARC Score methodology. “The portfolio capabilities evaluated include architecture, a range of product-related criteria, as well as end-user satisfaction. Market execution takes into account factors such as the vendors’ product, sales and marketing strategies, organizational and financial strength, and customer support ratings based on end-user feedback.”

To appear in the BARC Score Business Intelligence, vendors must fulfil a number of technical and economic criteria. Firstly, they must have license revenues in excess of 15 million Euro in at least two of the following four key geographical regions:

  • EMEA
  • North America
  • Latin America
  • Asia/Pacific

Furthermore, each vendor must supply at least four out of five technologies from the following:

  • Formatted Reporting
  • Dashboarding
  • Ad-hoc Query and Reporting
  • Analysis
  • Data Mining

For more information, click here

Media Enquiries

For all media enquiries, please contact:

Mark Handford
Tel: + 44 (0)1536 772 451
mhandford@barc-research.com

About BARC

BARC is an enterprise software industry analyst delivering product evaluations, conferences, market research and consulting to over 1,000 customers each year. BARC specializes in advising organizations on software selection in its core research areas of business intelligence, data management and enterprise content management.

Along with CXP and Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), BARC forms part of the CXP Group – the leading European IT research and consulting firm with 140 staff in eight countries.

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Permira Private Equity and Canada Pension Plan Take Informatica Private

Author: Andreas Bitterer

Published: 9 April 2015

Abstract:
In a surprising move, Informatica Corporation, a publicly traded and market-leading provider of data integration, data quality and master data management solutions agreed to be acquired by two private equity firms that will take the vendor private.

Click here to download the full article

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Marlin Equity Partners Acquires Arcplan

Authors: Carsten Bange, Andreas Bitterer

Published: 7 April 2015

Abstract:
German business intelligence software vendor Arcplan has agreed to be acquired by US-based private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners for an undisclosed sum. The Arcplan company and its product portfolio is expected to be merged with Longview Solutions, a Canadian provider of business performance management solutions and another Marlin Equity Partners portfolio company.

Click here to download the full article