Qlik launches new cloud data platform, sets GenAI alliances with Snowflake and AWS

Data analytics and integration tech developer Qlik has launched the Qlik Talend Cloud, a new data management platform based on technology stemming from Qlik’s 2023 acquisition of Talend, and debuted a new generative AI assistant for utilising unstructured data.

Qlik, which held its annual Qlik Connect event in Orlando this week, also announced alliances with Snowflake and Amazon Web Services designed to accelerate the adoption of AI and generative AI capabilities.

With the wave of interest in AI and generative AI technology, a major theme at Qlik Connect was the importance of data and data management for any successful AI strategy.

“Without data quality, without data governance, your AI is useless, because you’re going to lose trust in it,” Qlik CEO Mike Capone said in a pre-Qlik Connect interview with CRN US.

That’s the focus of the newly announced alliances with Snowflake and AWS. “In both cases, our ability to actually integrate data at high velocity – but, more importantly, check the quality of it, the veracity of it, the lineage of it – is going to be really important.,” Capone said.

Qlik has long been a leader in the data analytics space with its Qlik Sense and Qlik Cloud Analytics offerings. It has expanded its data integration offerings through a number of acquisitions, including Attunity in 2019. In May of last year Qlik completed its blockbuster acquisition of Talend, a developer of data transformation, data quality and data governance software.

The company has also expanded its technology portfolio through such acquisitions as the 2021 acquisition of machine learning tech provider Big Squid; its December 2023 purchase of Mozaic, a developer of AI-driven data management technology; and the January 2024 acquisition of Kyndi, a developer of generative AI and natural language processing tools for searching and analysing unstructured data.

The new Qlik Talend Cloud, built on the Qlik Cloud infrastructure and slated for availability later this summer, is the fruit of the Talend acquisition. It provides a unified package of data integration and data curation capabilities for building and deploying AI-augmented ELT (extract, load and transform) pipelines that deliver trusted data assets throughout an organisation, according to Qlik’s descriptions of the new product.

“We’ve brought together all the capabilities that we acquired with Talend…and now fully integrated all the [Talend] tools and capabilities and the Qlik data integration capabilities into one platform,” Capone said. “What that enables you to do is rapidly and easily build and deploy data pipelines, from raw data all the way through, with our capabilities of data integration, data lake management, data quality, data governance and data transformation.”

The platform delivers AI-augmented data integration with “extensive” data quality and data governance capabilities, according to the company. Its data engineering tools provide “a spectrum” of data transformation capabilities – from no-code to pro-code options – for creating AI-ready data for complex AI projects, the company said.

Qlik Talend Cloud also incorporates SaaS data connectivity functionality from Talend’s 2018 acquisition of startup Stitch, boosting the platform’s ability to work with diverse data sources. The platform also includes a curated data marketplace that simplifies data discovery and data sharing, and the Qlik Talend Trust Score for AI for assessing data health and quality for AI readiness.

“Part of the Qlik Talend Cloud story is going to be this AI readiness index for your data,” Capone said. “We’re starting to see that smaller, but higher quality datasets are actually way more predictive than lots and lots of data that doesn’t have the same quality level.”

A Qlik Talend Cloud Starter Package and other editions will be available later this year. While Qlik continues to support on-premises implementations of its Qlik and Talend products, the new Qlik Talend Cloud system is available only through the cloud, Capone said.

The new Qlik Answers, which incorporates technology from the Kyndi acquisition, is an out-of-the-box, generative AI-powered knowledge assistant for searching, accessing and utilizing unstructured data from a broad range of sources including PDF and Word documents, webpages and Microsoft Sharepoint.

“What this does is it gives us the ability to harness that data and basically run and use it like analytics, run natural language processing, run modern day AI capabilities against it, and help users get value out of that data,” Capone said. “You can synthesise all this crazy unstructured data [that’s] all over your enterprise and make sense of it and ask questions of it.”

Under Qlik’s multi-year strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with AWS the two companies will link Qlik’s software with AWS cloud and generative AI technologies, improving customers’ ability to use data for AI tasks. Qlik already relies on the AWS platform to run its data analytics and data management cloud services.

Under the SCA the two companies will integrate Qlik products with AWS generative AI services such as Amazon Bedrock for AI application development. They will improve the ability to integrate and utilise data from SAP applications for AI tasks running on AWS and leverage Qlik technology to enable data compliance and privacy operations across AWS regions. Qlik and AWS also will engage in co-marketing and co-selling efforts to accelerate AI technology adoption.

At the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024, held in San Francisco this week, Qlik said it has adopted Snowflake Cortex AI, the company’s fully managed AI service that provides access to large language models. The move will make it possible for Qlik users to leverage Cortex for AI-driven analytics.

“These are going to be tremendous accelerators for our partners,” Capone said of the AWS and Snowflake deals. They will allow partners to build data pipelines and leverage data for AI initiatives more easily, generating value from those projects more quickly. “Partners can focus on the outcome with the customers, not the [data] plumbing,” he said.

“What you’re trying to do is get value out of the data for your enterprise so you can become more profitable, grow faster [and] deliver a better service,” Capone said of Qlik customers. “And that’s what our partners do. They help customers solve problems. AI is going to be a way to do that. And data has always been a way to do that. Harnessing data has always been a way to do that. So now they get the best of all worlds.”