White Paper on QlikView or Tableau

Rehan Sheikh
Kant Gupta
Dec 4, 2014
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White Paper on QlikView or Tableau

Table of Contents
Why to use BI Tools.3
Compare Qlikview and Tableau..3
Tableau and Features.4
QlikView and Features..5
Conclusion..6
Appendices.7

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White Paper on QlikView or Tableau

Why to use BI Tools
Business intelligence (BI) is the set of
techniques and tools for the transformation of
raw data into meaningful and useful
information for business analysis purposes. BI
technologies are capable of handling large
amounts of unstructured data to help identify,
develop and otherwise create new strategic
business opportunities. The goal of BI is to
allow for the easy interpretation of these large
volumes of data. Identifying new opportunities
and implementing an effective strategy based
on insights can provide businesses with a
competitive market advantage and long-term
stability

more graphics that analyze the presented data

and tell a story! So, the graphics-heavy
documents cannot simply contain visual
elements; the graphics must be neatly
integrated to show insights or trends and
patterns that are obviously visible to both the
expert and the novice.

Compare QlikView and Tableau

In this context, two visualization tools worth
mentioning are QlikView and Tableau, both of
which have been defined as leaders in
Gartners 2014 Magic Quadrant.

BI technologies provide historical, current and

predictive views of business operations.
Common functions of business intelligence
technologies are reporting, online analytical
processing, analytics, data mining, process
mining, complex event processing, business
performance
management, benchmarking, text
mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive
analytics.
In a competitive global business environment,
performance-driven executives have seconds
to convince a skeptical audience. A typical
business presentation may combine text,
graphics, animated charts and graphs, and
interactive dashboards to sell its story. Thus,
the visual elements of the presentation play
a vital role in adding clarity and
comprehension to complex business messages.
Graphics-enabled presentations are evolving
and becoming more robust.
Todays business presentations often
leverage advanced visualization tools that
make the brilliant stand out of the ordinary.
The modern-day audience is not happy with
just glossy interactive graphics. They want
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Both these tools have scaled beyond the

average capabilities of embellishing the text
with glossy, interactive dashboards and ad-hoc
reports.
QlikView and Tableau are two leading
products in the field of BI and both provide
excellent conditions for optimal use. We have
made independent comparison to evaluate the
products from the point of view of the
challenges, features and the company's
situation and to make a choice in favor of a
more suitable solution for the company.

White Paper on QlikView or Tableau

Tableau
Tableau is groundbreaking data visualization
software created by Tableau Software
(www.tableausoftware.com) and is a
powerful, flexible application. Tableau
connects easily to nearly any data source, be it
corporate Data Warehouse, Microsoft Excel or
web-based data. It allows for instantaneous
insight by transforming data into visually
appealing, interactive visualizations called
dashboards. This process takes only seconds or
minutes rather than months or years, and is
achieved through the use of an easy to use
drag-and-drop interface. By using Tableau
visualizations, users gain the ability to quickly
answer questions; company data becomes a
competitive advantage instead of an
underutilized asset.

Features: The Visualizations are drag and

drop, and have vibrant automatically
generated colors. The drag and drop metaphor
makes time to answer very fast indeed. Inmemory BI platform enables highly scalable
and rapid visualizations. Self-service platform
has no need to rely on IT to provide data.
Multiple data sources can be used for a single
sheet. This also has ability to apply filters and
date ranges on the fly and support Mac OX10
recently.

The Enterprise Data Warehouse:

Tableau is an interactive analytic application
that has a rich conversation with database.
Tableau flourishes when this database is fast,
large, and has a variety of data subjects stored
in it. Tableau is bound by all the security
constraints defined at the database level,
which helps organizations be sure that access
is properly controlled.

Ease of Use: Tableau solves the problem of

understanding the data not just tabulating it
but by providing data visualization and visual
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analysis. It gives users flexible, easy ways to

display data in whatever format makes the
patterns most visible.

Tableau offers the ability to create different

views of data and change them as needs
evolve. And switching between views is as
easy as a click, so users dont have to wait on
an IT change request to understand data.

Integration: Tableau can be used to access,

visualize and analyze the data with a broad
range of data sources including spreadsheets,
CSV, SQL , Oracle databases, Salesforce,
Cloudera Hadoop, Google Analytics, Google
BigQuery, Hortonworks Hadoop, Tera data.
Data sources allows for an analyst to be active
with the data in a process of asking and
answering questions naturally taking
advantage of the Active Data Warehouse
concepts

Gain Insight: Tableau allows analytical

frameworks to be manipulated. It allows an
analyst to gain insight by changing
perspectives and seeing information as data
are compared differently. Online Data sources
provide the computing capability and
architecture that allows massive amounts of
data or summaries of those data to be
delivered to changing analytic contexts
efficiently. Thus, the analyst does not lose
perspective as they navigates from one

White Paper on QlikView or Tableau

question to the next. Data sources allow data
to be interactively manipulated as Tableau
allows analysts to experiment with analytical
frameworks.

Ad-hoc, on-demand, interactive

exploration: A fixed set of data can never
give users the flexibility to ask whichever
questions they need for exploring information,
refining their understanding as they go and
asking further questions. Tableau solve this
problem with ad-hoc, on-demand, interactive
exploration. The data sources can provide the
speed needed for ad hoc, interactive data
exploration while Tableau provides the
analytical interface.

Pricing: Free Desktop version called Public

that makes data available to all. Private
versions come with fixed fee $999 or $1,999
depending on data access. Tableau Server anecdotal evidence says $1k/server user, with
minimum of 10 users plus maintenance.

QlikView
QlikView is the most flexible Business
Intelligence platform for turning data into
knowledge. More than 24,000 organizations
worldwide have enabled their users to easily
consolidate, search, and visually analyze all
their data for unprecedented business
insight. Effective decision-making is based on
having the right information available and easy
accessible with QlikView. It allows business
users to create their own analyses so they can
arrive at innovative decisions. QlikView lets IT
serve the business like never beforeall while
assuring strict data security, quality, and
governance.

Features: Visualizations are wizard-driven;

colors have to be selected. In-memory BI
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platform provides much faster analysis than

traditional OLAP. Self-service platform - no
need to rely on IT to provide data. Built-in ETL
engine to transform disparate data sets into a
common data structure. Associative inference
engine for uncovering associations in data sets.
Mac not supported for Server, Desktop. Thirdparty connector to statistical analysis platform
R available. In-memory analytics dependent on
abundant local memory if speed is to be
maintained.

Enterprise Data warehouse: QlikView

is designed to protect organizations critical
data and analysis assets. QlikView integrates
with existing security infrastructures
specifically designed to safeguard billions of
records or thousands of users. QlikViews easyto-administer security console enables IT to
control which users see which analyses, data,
metrics, and results, define security from the
application level all the way down to granular
row level & support standard directory service
systems such as Microsoft Active Directory and
other LDAP solutions Enforce group, rolebased, and individual user

Integration: Qlikview Integrates with a

very broad range of data sources including
Amazon Vectorwise, EC2, and Redshift,
Cloudera Hadoop and Impala, CSV, DatStax,
Epicor Scala, EMC Green Plum, Hortonworks
Hadoop, HP Vertica, IBM DB2 and many more.
QlikView is designed to tightly integrate with
existing security systems and data sources, and
preserve existing investments. This limits risk
and improves the cost effectiveness of
deployments. Rapid yet controlled
development and deployment ensure a fast
time to value under strict, centralized
guidelines.

White Paper on QlikView or Tableau

Target Users: QlikView enables IT

professionals, who desire strong visualization
capabilities with BI reporting tools, to deliver
far more analytics and BI to the business than
with any other approach. With its rapid
application development capability, requests
from the business for new apps can be
answered much more quickly, changes to
existing applications made easily and with its
self-service approach, business users can get
answers to their own questions without
turning back to IT for a new report. This all
contributes to the success of QlikView and
makes IT groups who provide it to an
organization true champions to the business.

Empowers Business Users: QlikView

delivers business value immediately because
few new skills are required by analysts and
developers to produce QlikView apps. With
QlikView, IT managers and business analysts
can rapidly create apps that focus on the
analytics that matter most to business users.
And they can quickly extend and enhance
those apps as business needs change.
QlikViews self-service model also means
ongoing requests for new reports from
business users are dramatically lowered.
QlikView frees up valuable time for IT
managers and their staff so they can focus on
higher-value tasks such as data governance,
data quality, data modeling, and data security.

Maximum Scalability: The QlikView

Business Discovery platform provides Support
for thousands of users or billions of records
and automatic load balancing to ensure
maximum performance even with thousands
of users. QlikView has an optimized
architecture that takes full advantage of the
most advanced 64-bit Intel architectures and
seamless integration of 32-bit and 64-bit data
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sources. It can do up to 90% data compression

and has Hybrid in-memory and direct data
access capabilities for Big Data analytics. Also
support for the latest in virtualization and
cloud deployment models Resilience, with
built-in failover options

Gain Insight: It Combines visualization with

in-memory BI tool and ETL engine. Easy to
manipulate data from multiple sources on the
fly. With QlikView search, users type relevant
words or phrases in any order and get instant,
associative results. With a global search bar,
users can search across the entire data set.
With search boxes on individual list boxes,
users can confine the search to just that field.
Users can conduct both direct and indirect
searches.

Pricing: Each named user license is $1,350

and $15,000 for a concurrent user. Server
license is $35,000/server. Additional
$21,000/server for PDF distribution service;
$22,500 for SAP NetWeaver connector. May
require RAM upgrades if large numbers of
concurrent users

Conclusion
With Tableau its easy to produce good
visualizations without really knowing what we
want to see at the beginning of developing a
report because its so easy to move
components, change the chart type and build
filters. With Qlikview , we need to have a good
idea of what we want to produce before
starting the report and it takes far longer to
build the different components of the report
than Tableau. From an analysis tool
perspective Tableau is far more powerful than
Qlikview . Qlikview can produce better reports
but it takes more skill and time to develop
than with Tableau. If the company has a
structured environment with relatively

White Paper on QlikView or Tableau

generous deadlines, supported by a good
technical team then Qlikview could be the
correct product for that company as its slightly
stronger for reporting.

Appendices:
https://www.trustradius.com/compareproducts/qlikview-vs-tableaudesktop#Product_usability
http://www.tableausoftware.com/community
/support/documentation-old
http://community.qlik.com/docs/DOC-3325
https://apandre.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/
dv-comparison-2011/
https://apandre.wordpress.com/tools/compar
ison/
http://reports4u.co.uk/tableau-vs-qlikview/

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