QlikTech holds its first Analyst Day in New York

Tom Paine

Radnor-based QlikTech, the rapidly growing Business Intelligence software vendor that went public in the summer of 2010, went to New York this past Thursday to hold what it called its first annual "Analyst Day" for people in the financial community who follow the company ( Listen to Webcast). Any quant jocks just there simply hoping to update their spreadsheets might have been disappointed, as there was barely a mention of QlikTech's financials except for CFO Bill Sorenson reaffirming the 4th quarter guidance the company issued in late October (full year revenue of $315.0 million to $320.0 million, same bottom line guidance). He did, however, suggest the possibility of some uncertainty in Europe, where 56% of its revenue comes from.

What the presentation was about was the product and market, and I have to admit
that it was a very polished and powerful message, whether or not you buy the whole pitch. It is worth listening to just for learning how to give better presentations. QlikTech CEO Lars Bjork started off by comparing the company's core principle to innovators Google, Apple and Salesforce.com: simplicity, with depth. Bjork sees the "traditional" BI market, estimated at about $9 billion per year, as addressing only a small number of heavy users in mostly the large enterprise market, plus some penetration of mid-sized and small enterprises. The rest of the market is largely undeveloped, he said.

Newly named Vice President of Product Management and leading BI evangelist Donald Farmer, who joined QlikTech early this year from Microsoft, focused on the 28% penetration of potential users reported by Gartner, a figure he says has gone unchanged for many years, and talked about how QlikTech is working to change that with a solution that is mobile, social, and personal. Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Products Anthony Deighton compared what he calls BI's traditional, IT-driven and top down BI model with limited report flexibility to QlikTech's associative, user driven and dynamic real-time model. Its key technologies are its in-Memory processing (combined with data compression) and user interface. Deighton described in-Memory technology, which processes chunks of data in memory rather than from disk, as the enabler, not the end goal in itself, of QlikTech's product strategy.

COO Les Bonney summarized the major points of QlikTech's go to market strategy: Rapid Time to Value (quick initial deployment), Balanced (diversified) Business, Land and Expand (start small within enterprise and grow), Love Every Lead, and Customer Success. Bonney emphasized that Qliktech is getting more large contracts from major enterprises, and is also getting a boost from its relationships with some of the big systems integrators. QlikTech relys on its partners to reach much of the middle market, and an inside sales group to serve smaller customers. One partner who presented was Business & Decision, a large BI consulting firm with its US headquarters in Wayne.

QlikTech's market value is currently just over $2.1 billion. It went public in July 2010 at $10 per share, and has traded as high as $35. Today it was at slightly over $25. Revenue growth has continued in the 50% range, though some have questioned a lack of short-term emphasis on profits. I think the point of QlikTech's presentation was to show how big a market opportunity the company believes is in front of it.

QlikTech just announced the general availablty of it latest version, QlikView 11.



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