Mr. Varun’s Perspective on Qlik and the industry..
Varun: At Qlik we started as an organization almost three decades back, our objective has always been to simplify decision-making for the business users, for the users in the organization, and how they can leverage the data. A better way we’ve observed over the years, there has been a lot of the intelligence that the users get is very passive; it’s usually dated, and they have to go to the dashboard to find some information, that information is usually a day or two days old. Our journey is how we help organizations to move from this passive intelligence journey to an active intelligence journey. Wherein we help organizations get the right data to the right people at the right time in a more real-time environment. As soon as a transaction happens, we kind of give an alert to the users that something is happening. Do you want to do something about it? that’s been our objective. In this journey, there are lots of small pillars that you can have, that build the whole picture, one is finding the right data from various systems that are there. Second, is consolidating that data and governing that data so that people can find the right data and take the right decision from that governed data, then analyze that data will get deeper into the data, find more about the data, and then also kind of take actions on top of it. Usually, in business intelligence, what we see is that you get the insights, but then after that, everything is very manual, and we automate to make it more prescriptive for the users to take decisions on top of it. In this journey, there are three key pillars. One is the data pillar; how do you find the right data? Second is the analysis pillar, how do you kind of analyze that data once found? If you’ve done the tech part but how do you enable the organization also to do that not everyone in an organization is a data scientist, I’m not one but I want to use the data, to get the maximum out of my data. I kind of democratize data decodes the organization with respect to how they leverage the data right. The third pillar is how do we make our organization data literate, how do we make our people more skilled and once these three pillars kind of work together, then we talk about moving towards an active intelligence kind of platform. This is what we broadly do about Qlik India. We started operations as I said, Qlik started operations almost three decades back, we started our operations almost a decade back a little more than that now, with headquarters in Bangalore. Now we have three other offices apart from Bangalore, we have an office in NCR, Mumbai and we have an R & D centre in Vadodara also. We make a lot of software out of India so, we’re in line with India’s making India strategy. Qlik has over 800 plus customers in India in different domains, starting from the public sector, banking, financial Services, and IT sector, huge presence here. As we kind of get into this discussion, I’ll share some snapshots of how different customers are using Qlik in this journey. This is the broad overview of what we are and what we do as an organization.
Khushagra: Initially, I just want to go through the awareness and importance of the fact of the data management in Indian market because I feel that there’s a lot of scope for improvement. There’s a lot of scope for people using the data management products right now. So, care to weigh in on that?
Varun: Data is becoming more and more relevant in the organizations, if we talk about data as an opportunity. We did a survey with IDC and we spoke about organizations that got benefited out of their data journey. Most of the organization said that, yes, we could improve our efficiency, we could increase our revenue or profit to the tune of 75 to 76%. That’s the kind of improvement that organizations see when they kind of invest in the data. We can kind of a little deeper into it that if people are seeing benefits out of it, what are they doing about it? because every interaction is creating data, you and me talking today, we are recording this session, this is data, you will provide me with some feedback, I’ll provide you with some feedback, that is some data, then we leverage this data to make probably the next interaction better, or do something more about it. This huge amount of data that is kind of getting captured, it’s very important for the organizations to make maximum out of it. We went back again to the same organization and said that if you got benefited out of your investments in data but what did you do? where did you invest?
There were three key parameters which really came out of that discussion, one is that they are investing a lot in data and analytics solutions, which is in line with what you asked that data management is a space, and is it getting more and more exciting? Definitely, yes. When we asked the organization, and this survey was again done by us, it was an analysis, which was done with BCG. What we found out is that around 80% of buyers are investing more in data analytics projects. Similarly, there is a big acceleration toward the cloud, a lot of data is moving toward the cloud. That is the second key trend that we found out within these organizations, which are investing a lot in data that is moving to the cloud. I think the pandemic has a big role to play, before the pandemic, there was still skepticism about moving to the cloud but I think nowadays big acceleration towards that organization. Even if I say that people are still not fully to the cloud, but almost every organization is on a hybrid cloud, that’s another key trend that we saw. Last, which is more pertaining to what we do, we saw that people are moving away from a dashboard kind of analytics to more embedded analytics, they don’t want to go to a specific analytics system to analyze their data, they want that data to be embedded in the system that they use that system can be a mobile app that their service delivery people are using for a distribution company or it might be a sales for application were used by the sales folks so they want to embed the analytics within those system rather than going to a separate system. These are some of the key trends that we’ve seen in Data Management space. Definitely, to enable all these things, one of the biggest trends is can you get the right data at the real time. Most of the times in the past these data management projects have been very long, one to two years journey where and then by the time you reach the goalpost that you said two years back, the goalposts have already changed, so can we kind of make that date. The fun big trend in Data Management is can we make it more real time? can we get the real time data to the next layer of analytics so that people can make maximum out of it? So, these are the key things that we’ll be seeing in this space.
Khushagra: Just as mentioned that initially people are looking into will have a two year or three year goals in establishing their data management software, but I feel that after the pandemic, people are quite crushing it in establishing the data management software’s in any part of segment of the domains and department. So how does how does Qlik provide the services to fill in these gaps of all the working different sectors or departments to have the workflow in very smooth and cumulative way?
Varun: As I said, there are three pillars to it, one is data integration, we do have specific app offerings around data integration, wherein you can get real time data from any source that you are capturing the data into the next analytics layer. Then we do have solutions around data governance, which is more data cataloging and everything so that can you create a shopping cart of data, so if we go to Amazon, we select a product and buy that product, can we make a similar kind of data, a shopping cart for a user, if he says that okay. Suppose if Khushagra today wants to analyze something about Qlik, and he has that data in his database. He chooses Qlik and then chooses data management as the second subject areas, he can consolidate that data and do something about it, these are the few plays around data integration. Once the data is integrated, as I said, data analytics is the second big pillar, we have the one and only clouds fully Qlik cloud solution, it allows users to analyze the data. When I say analyze the data, it talks about not only the diagnostic analysis, very new guy doing drill down and doing more advanced analytics, but it also captures cognitive intelligence, as well as artificial intelligence, where have we built a no code, auto machine learning platform so that our business users can use algorithms without the knowledge of sophisticated languages like Python, or something, etc. Any business users can use our new workload, Auto ML platform to leverage machine learning to get more out of the data, simplifying the data and analytics part for the users. Finally, as I said, the third key area that we are investing a lot is in data literacy, that how can we enable organizations and that’s not a tech thing that is more of organization change, that how organizations behave with respect to leveraging data. We do have a lot of offerings around data literacy also. These are the three key areas, we kind of consolidate all these three areas together. On top of that, we’ve created the click cloud platform, which takes real time data from any source systems to advance analytics, like predictive or prescriptive analytics to the users on single platform.
Khushagra: For usage of all this data, it is quite easy for top corporates to have a training session ate their end and enable all their employees to make the use of the software very easily. How would you say that your software behaves to the people in the low to mid-tier of working industry?
Varun: There are two perspectives to it, even if it is a top organization, let me take my example, I manage this business but I am not a person who’s a statistician who can kind of get maximum out of the data because I don’t probably have that knowledge of a data scientist that someone else in my organization has. That’s a challenge that every organization has, whether it is a big or a small organization. There are business users who wants to get maximum out of the data, but they’re not skilled enough to do it, that is where organizations or like us come into the picture where we kind of build technology, which is simple enough for anyone and everyone to use that technology. I usually take this example, if your Android phone user or iPhone phone user, if I kind of swap those phones for you for a day, struggle is on the day and next seven days also. It’s not easy even if we have like very mobile savvy, but if we change the technology, it is going to be difficult for everyone to do that. Same as in the data analytics space also, my real job is to manage Qlik India’s business with respect to how we are developing this ecosystem, my real job is not to analyze the data. That’s there. So can we have a technology which can help me do my business in a better way? that’s what we kind of approach this problem on how we can help everyone in the organizations whether it is a large organization or a small organization to get maximum out of the data. In smaller organizations there are two perspectives it can be beneficial also and it can be slow as you mentioned in your question. Alternate beneficial from the perspective that because these organizations are fast, so the chain isn’t that investment aspect of the organization is going to be fast right. As I said, there the third pillar data literacy, making a data literate organization is usually faster in the smaller organization, because there are lesser number of people, and they can adapt to the change faster. When we’re talking about lakhs of people in an organization, it’s very difficult to change the behavior of the organization or at a fast pace. There’s also benefits of leveraging data in a small organization but definitely, as you said, that in larger organizations, there is a muscle to kind of define those training programs also, which might not be there. That’s where tech organizations like ours come into the picture, where we kind of build technology in a way which is easy to use, like we have a self-service training, offerings, so you can go to our website, and get trained on how to leverage Qlik in the best possible way. We give it to the organizations who use our software, they can go to their online training module, it’s very much like anything that you see in Coursera, or any other Ed-Tech platform. Similarly, Qlik education program gives you that complete overview and at a self-paced journey, you can learn and go about your Qlik journey.
Khushagra: Qlik has been in the industry in India for quite a while now, whichever region of India has been the most challenging for you to establish?
Varun: Qlik in India has been there for almost a decade now. We started our operations in 2010, while as an organization we’ve been since 1993. On the challenges, every year is a different challenge. I am in click for last 11 years, when we started operations, we hardly had any customers, so people didn’t even know about us. We came here and we were kind of competing against larger organizations like SAP and IBM, etc., in the data analytics space. Every year kind of brought a different challenge for us. Initially, here’s the challenge on how do we kind of get into different territories? How do we create a partner ecosystem, which can take it to every nook and corner of the country. After 10 years, I can say we’ve done a very good job at it to make a very successful kind of ecosystem. There are three to four things which are very important, one is how you have built the tech, is your tech kind of evolving every day so that users are getting more and more out of it. That’s what has done very well, we are ahead of the curve in the business analytics space. In whatever we do, like I said, we are the only cloud platform which can work from ingestion of real time data to do advanced analytics in a single platform. Everything that comes into the pure view of analytics, that tech part we’ve done very well. It has helped us to get deeper into various organization. The second part is, have you built a good partner ecosystem, so we have very strong partnership ecosystem of 40 plus solution providers. These are small analytics firms, which only work on analytics work with us and work with our customers. Also, establishing big partnership with the system integrators like Infosys, TCS, L&T Infotech or whether it is consulting players like PWC, KPMG, Deloitte, etc. That’s the second thing that we’ve done pretty well build that ecosystem there. Also, working with other similar organizations like us, like other tech organizations, the hyper scalars, Amazon, Microsoft, how do we kind of integrate with them, innovate with them together so that we can build solutions, which work together very well. These are the few things that we’ve invested over the years, which has helped us mitigate a lot of challenges that we felt. Some years, there was a challenge, we wanted to get into public sector, but we were very small as an organization, talking about six, seven years back, then we decided to start investing in the public sector space. Now, we have a full-fledged team of public sector consultants as well as salespeople defined offering. When we work very strongly with government of India and many initiatives, sometimes the challenge has been that I’ve not been able to kind of get into this part of the geography. It is very easy to work in top 1012 cities, you get the partners there, but what if I want go beyond Ahmedabad and get into the other Gujarat territory beyond Jaipur. The regions where they put has lot of industry, we kind of go there also. That’s where we leverage our partner ecosystem because you cannot be kind of present everywhere. We found local partners so we are partners in Orissa, Jaipur also, that’s how we kind of gone into the addressing the whitespace. around that. As said, every year has presented a different challenge and I think we’ve done pretty well to grow to this stage as an organization.
Khushagra: Apart from the region criteria, what part of the working domain like healthcare industry or tech industry only seems to be the most data literate, or be like most active and responsive in terms of data usage and management.
Varun: Okay, I’ll refer to a thing that someone from the automobile industry told me a couple of months back, while having a discussion with them, he was saying that anything and everything that can help us move faster into this digital journey, we are going to invest on that. In fact, we were kind of joking around that he was saying that you could whenever put a proposal, we just put digital on top of it and that proposal will kind of start flying within our organization. So, giving you view that digital is a big focus for every organization, currently and obviously, they were organizations which were fast movers in this. There were industries, which will fast movers. There are tech organizations, which like to be innovated every day, they move very fast. There are sectors which were probably slower when we talk about, say public sector assets. Public sector, usually the inertia in the initiatives is not small, I’ll not say that they’re slow but the initiatives are so big, that they’re kind of transforming the whole ecosystem on how probably the people are going to engage with that particular organization. Whether it is national as authority, working on a complete data mission project, of which is not like a one-year journey, that journey itself is like seven to eight years long. We’ve seen those kinds of journeys, also flying through and we’ve seen that there’s a very small tech organization, which like moving fast getting big valuations every passing day. They will kind of move fast from one user to 1000s of users within a few days. Some of the very strong stories that probably I would like to share with you our stories around how I perceive a successful analytics project is with respect to that and what kind of impact that project is making to that organization. One of the examples is TCS, it is like everyone in India knows TCS has 6006 lakhs plus employees. When they wanted to start their journey, they said that they want to start with at least 22,000 Plus decision makers getting access to the data. TCS did not say that they have a CEOs office and there are around 100 people in that office, which are direct reports and we will build a management information system for them. The starting point itself was 20,000 Plus users and that’s when they started the journey almost four years back. Recently, they got a global transformation award in our Qlik World. Qlik World is an event that we do every year, where we celebrate our success as well as the success of our customers and we award transformation project for customers across the globe. This year TCS got that award and when they were talking, we’ve created that award video and everything. I’ll probably share with you also after this discussion. They spoke that they have touched 70 Plus departments within their organization, 700 Plus dashboards, about $2 million of resource effort and money being saved every year with respect to automating this old data pipeline that they have done. If we talk about impact of the organization, 70 departments cover everyone; 22,000 people also covers every department and all the key people that will come into the decision-making journey and then you talk about benefits. I started the discussion with the kind of benefits people have got with data Germany, and TCS could specify that they saved around $2 million every year. This is very impactful, which I feel kind of changed the way how TCS started looking at data within their organization. Another one that I would like to talk about is National Stock Exchange of India.
Khushagra: The next part of the question was for the same only, about your recent ties with NSE (National Stock Exchange of India). It must have created a whole new equilibrium for Qlik in every aspect.
Varun: Yeah, exactly. So, if you see, largest stock exchange in India, fifth largest in the world, when it comes to derivatives, its largest in the world. Also, you can understand the kind of data that is traveling so, the second parameter I value very hard, high in any analytics journey is what kind of data you are putting in the analytic system and what kind of data can churn out. When we started working with NSE, they said that, after processing all the data through our analytic system, which was the previous analytic system, they still have to spend around five hours of manual effort to reconciler, consolidate and do a lot of other things before they could give the reports to the regulators. After deploying Qlik, within three months, they were talking about the reduce from that five hour to 10- 20 minutes. Now, we’re talking about reducing that further to a more real time of environment, so, that’s real when you can really see the benefit. It’s an industry where regulation is very important, because there is a possibility of fraud in every million milliseconds so regulation is very important. The data is huge, we’re talking about almost billions of records being included, dashboards being analyzed every day, right. It’s easy to say billions of records, but when you really start analyzing, and it needs to work with your speed of thought. Also, it should not be that you click a dashboard and then you go for a coffee and by the time you’re back, that report is in front of your desktop. It has to kind of move with the speed of your task and within two to three seconds, you should get the results that you want otherwise, people are not going to use that technology. Gone are the days where people were ready to wait for data to be available to them, new generation is not like that. The amount of data available at speed of thought, getting that data in a real time environment for a business specific meet definitely added a lot of value to them. These are two stories, which kind of I resonate very well. Another one is more public sector and you touched upon it in one of the questions that it is very easy to train people in an organization in a large and they can do more with the data. This is an example of a very large organization which has Indian Oil problems, the largest organization in India, we were having a public sector event their Executive Director head, Mr. Lowe Khanna was one of the speakers. I was with him, like you’re asking me questions, I was asking him questions at that point of time. I asked him that what was your bowel movement with Qlik, he said that we hire a lot of officers in Indian oil every year these people are like oil sector experts, they’re not like techies. These are people which are going to work in refineries and they’re going to work in that domain. They are still engineers, and they call them officers. They said that we conducted a training for all our officers, and they were like 300-400 people in that training. Qlik conducted that training and online training, this was at the time of pandemic. According to him, after that training, they could see huge adoption of Qlik where everyone started building more out of the data because they could see that it is such an easy technology to use that they could self-service themselves rather than going back to the IT team. Think about a scenario of public sector organization, and people working in that organization not being dependent on anyone else to do something. As soon as we say public sector, there is a notion that there’s a different kind of culture there but that’s not what Mr. Lowe Khanna talks about an organization which kind of moves very fast. It works with users who are not like it users, work with the data themselves and do more with that data. These three stories I kind of really like about how people have benefited one is the scale of the deployment. 20,000 plus people, 70 plus department and then the scale of the data. Billions of records being analyzed, and the time says and then the self-service capabilities is it easy enough to use, if it is difficult to use, you’re not going to use again. Coming back to that mobile environment example, Nokia was the most famous phone but it kind of disappeared, Blackberry then came it disappeared, why? because the new phones are easier to use, there’s nothing else. For last few years, there’s not very big innovation that is happening. Now, we’re kind of getting stagnant with that also, but that’s a completely different story. That’s how different industries and different organizations have got benefited by using.
Khushagra: We did have like an upward steep graph initially, in terms of innovation of any part of technology, integrating data or products or anything else, and like working with these huge fields of data is an important part of our workflow. So, I have a two-part question. What does the future look like to you for in terms of data integration, usage, management and analytics? and what does the future looks like for Qlik?
Varun: When we talk about data as an industry, the future is very bright. Actually, I always end the presentation with the next future, the growth is going to come from data investments only. You must have gone into many forums, where people have spoken about data as the new oil. It’s going to define the new, I’ve been in a content where a person has said that data is the new uranium. You mentioned that you really need to govern the data because if you don’t govern it, well it has a potential to kind of do a lot of damage, that’s another perspective. Another person kind of talked about, he’s a person from your fraternity, he’s a journalist, and I was having a conversation with him. He was talking about that data is not an oil or a uranium, data is the new water, because it’s not kind of not even water, he was saying here, water, something which is like, never going to end. Oil is not like going to be there forever the same way, where he said that data is going to be everywhere. Organizations which can kind of get maximum out of this data is going to get maximum out of it. Some of the key trends I already kind of touched upon initially and there is a big movement towards cloud. We see that a lot of organizations are taking that journey, is only going to get accelerated as we move over the time, we will see more and more applications moving to the cloud, more things happening there. We see merging of data integration and data analytics as a single thing. Usually in in a data journey, these two aspects are always treated separately. That’s where data integration is handled by the IT users and data analytics is done by the business users, that’s where the whole gap is. There is a lot of gap in an organization and you don’t get a maximum out of your investments, so we see these two kind of things merging together, because final objective is to get maximum out of that data, and data integration and analytics is just part of the whole return. I see a big trend around merging these two offerings. As said, we are at this point of time, the only organization which can do this whole thing in single platform, rather than having different pieces to kind of fill so that’s a big trend. I believe people will keep investing in data literacy upscaling is a big thing, we have a program called ‘Qlik Academy’ program in India, where we give our software to various universities in India as well as professors and students to run their projects to run their summer internships etc. even in their curriculums. We are at this point of time, there are around 700 Plus universities in India, which is using our software for such things and during COVID we saw 150% uptake of registrations in this program. This clearly shows that data literacy is a big scale, you do a search on Google, which is the highest paying job, it is data scientist or something related to the data. People are investing more and more in upskilling themselves, similarly organizations are investing more and more. There is going to be a big trend around data literacy also that how organizations change their behavior and define their processes around data, define their decision making around data, these are the things that I see from industry perspective changing. Coming to Qlik, our first perspective would be on enhancing our cloud journey. It is always going to be a customer plus cloud first of an environment where we keep on providing more and more capabilities into the cloud. I was in an event few days back, and I was talking about some eight or nine acquisitions that we’ve done in last two years, and how we integrated all these acquisitions as part of that single Qlik cloud solutions. Whether it is real time data integration, whether it is automated data warehousing, then data governance using a catalog data lineage capability, then advanced analytics, geo analytics capabilities, action, alerting capabilities on a more real time mode, actionable capabilities, where you can create a workflow and RPA kind of a mechanism within analytics only, and then prescriptive, as well as predictive analytics. Some of these offerings that are spoke about were created organically by us as an organization and some were part of the acquisitions that we did over the two years. What we’ve done differently is as we kept doing these acquisitions, we kind of integrated it into the single platform and kept enhancing that platform. Qlik cloud first is going to be a journey, a lot of exciting things in this journey. As I talked about, we started our first foray into predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics with Auto ML capability, which is industry’s first no code, machine learning platform; you just feed the data, it will train the data engine or find out the right algorithms from the plethora of algorithms it has, and it will give you the results based on that predictions and it will try and keep on training the model accordingly. As I said, our objective has always been simplified decision making for the users, so we bring these complex analytics capabilities to the normal business user also, is what we’ll keep working towards. Some more things that will keep as we kind of move in this journey is more data transformation capabilities within our platform, similar things to do more with the data, this is what I see with respect to our future roadmap.
Khushagra: Lastly, I just wanted to bring out one thing, like as we started to talk about that data is the new oil. So, every great thing that comes to in the market has a presence, and also has a negative impact and the data has to be stored somewhere, in multiple data centers out there, and getting that working and getting that power usage to carbon neutral is sustainable energy, I think it is important to consider that aspect as well.
Varun: Definitely, I kind of touched upon it when I spoke about data can be a new uranium also, if you don’t govern it, well, if you don’t secure it well, you don’t have mechanisms to govern that data and it gets into the wrong hands. Not even wrong hands, this data, which should not be available to everyone, it’s not even about going to the wrong hand even in a normal organization. If you have salary data, not everyone should have access to that salary data, so there has to be an mechanism that data is only available to either the HR folks or the managers or the employee himself as you will not want your salary to be kind of known to the world. There needs to be mechanisms to govern the data and as an organization, we kind of treat this very seriously. A lot of investments around the security frameworks we work with. When we talk about our Qlik cloud, there are a lot of security certifications which happens at a tech level, which we go through before going that, like when you have to use data, public sector data for US government in a cloud environment, there’s a certification that you need to do. There are data privacy laws in Europe, everyone knows about them. How do you kind of manage those? we comply to all these different laws, which are there. Even our country was contemplating a law around data security, which is kind of delayed a little bit now. We’ve seen that we as an organization through tech have been able to build solutions, which kind of adhere to these laws on the ground as well as so the idea of technology should be that we can you kind of build the core strength and give flexibility at the edges to the users to get data matching. That’s how we build our technology, that the core is strong. You cannot get into it till you are authorized to do that, and then you give all the flexibility to the users to do the search service around that.
