QlikTech claims to be the fastest growing BI company by growing revenues by over 80% last year. It now has 4,300 customers in 60 countries and adds 10 new customers every day.

Most interestingly, it claims 90% of its revenues are from software licence sales. Professional services and maintenance revenues are considered ‘pull-through’ by analysts like me. Licence revenue growth is the strongest indicator of future market share gains and shareholder value. The proportion of revenues from BI licences of many other BI vendors is currently around 30%. Hence my interest to find out what QlikTech is doing right.

Anthony is also an MBA with Distinction from Harvard, which reveals some pretty impressive brain power. The brightest and best in the hi-tech industry normally end up in product development. This leads to a ‘we build a better product’, rather than ‘we give customers what they want’ focus for most hi-tech companies. “What would happen if the reverse was true?” I asked. Maybe Anthony could provide some answers.

QlikTech believes that many BI vendors want to sell BI platforms rather than solutions. They are caught in the big BI squeeze between the enterprise stack vendors like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, and the innovative BI upstarts like QlikTech, Spotfire, and Tableau. It was suggested that BI vendors try to do everything (analytic applications, tools, data warehousing, data quality etc etc) to fend off the enterprise stack vendors, but end up doing none of these things particularly well. QlikTech's approach is different.

Point 1: make customer trial easy. Hence you can download their software free from their web site for a 15 day free trial.

Point 2: solve customer problems. QlikTech identifies a customer operational business problem and provides a relatively low cost point solution to solve it. QlikTech believes that other BI vendors try to sell a BI platform no matter what the business problem is. Cheap and cheerful point solutions are not on their agenda. But they are on QlikTech's—and give them a strategic account entry point and lots of mid-market customers.

Point 3: make it fun and addictive. BI vendors focus their proposition on ‘left brain’ attributes. Logical, rational, economic criteria. QlikTech also likes to engage ‘right brain’ attributes and build emotional customer attachments to the QlikTech brand. Hence QlikTech's marketing is bright, brash, colourful and engaging. For an example visit www.youtube.com and search for ‘QlikTech Addict’. This is an amusing, 3 minute video of a real (but anonymous) QlikView customer who shares his surreal experiences of using the QlikView product.

What suppliers should learn from QlikTech: make products easy to buy, take away user problems with low cost solutions, and make using your products fun and addictive. The take-away for customers? Search out innovative and engaging vendors who seek to deliver customer benefits. They may just make IT a great place to work in once again.