Qlik acquired by Thoma Bravo for $3B
businesswire.com
businesswire.com
Good riddance.
Qlik Sense is pretty snappy, has much improved UX, etc.
Qlik are top-right quadrant for BI tools, on a par with Tableau.
QlikView does have disadvantages (mostly related to UI as you rightfully mentioned) but its performance is almost never among them.
I hate their insistence on natural joins.
Your website gives a decent rundown, only part of it isn't displaying in portrait orientation on my iPhone6s+ :-(
I personally dislike the fact it relies on natural joins so you are forced to use defined columns with the same names and use Qlik syntax to disable table linking, but others love that feature.
As an ETL tool actually it's pretty good. But if they had decided to go with straight SQL and extended it to external sources then it wouldn't have stupid syntactical EXISTS and NOT EXISTS clauses, but that's all I can really fault it on.
It's a good tool for what it does, and it turns out that what it can do is a lot! The biggest issue I found was that whilst I picked up the syntax basics in a day and it's more intricate features in a week or two, most of the Qlik developers in Australia are morons who charge a lot and deliver very little. I was very lucky to have an amazing colleague who does know his stuff, but the consultants who we were eventually forced to get in were awful. Then again, the CEO of that company was just walked out the door for gross incompetence so it was probably a combo of stupid management and a limited talent pool for Qlik devs.
It was fun because it was a puzzle and I was helping fix broken things, but at some point you just ask yourself "what for?" when things are so broken and improve very slowly.
It pushed them out ahead of stalwarts like Cognos and Business Objects for a while.
When Microsoft entered the BI landscape they changed the world as we knew it by bundling a fairly decent BI stack right along with MSSQL and native Excel connectors, for free.
Many big names in the enterprise space went for it (and subsequently choked on Sharepoint) but I think this hit Qlikview pretty hard. They didn't have the legacy to withstand that battering that many of the more established BI offerings took during that chapter of the story.
Another interesting piece is that Qlik had a massive drop (~30%) in Q1 revenues versus Q4. [0] Enterprise software sales is seasonal, but this was pretty extreme.
Another interesting piece is their SG&A is very close to their revenue, and dwarfs R&D. This suggests that Sales and Support is what's going to get the big axe.
[0] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AQLIK&fstype=ii&ei=...
> This price represents a premium of 40% to the Company’s unaffected 10 day average stock price prior to March 3, 2016 of $21.83
Basically they took at 10-day average around a (somewhat) arbitrary date to price the stock for that 40% number. "Somewhat" because that date was when Eliott Management, an activist investor fund, bought a giant chunk of Qlik. That signaled a likely upcoming acquisition (which, as you said, the market was betting on). Thoma probably argues that signal moved the stock above it's "true" price.
The counterargument would be a defense of the efficient markets hypothesis: that the true price isn't about signals and technicals, it's just what someone is willing to pay.
This is part of a trend of activist investors and/or private equity taking companies private because the Street has unrealistic expectations.
I work in the field and I'm currently looking at choosing software, this info might be very important in these decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeover http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/takeover.asp
That's objectively untrue.
The last company I worked at went through an acquisition with Thoma Bravo and the very next day after acquisition was confirmed we walked into the office and there were security guards in suits with ear pieces patrolling the office. At 9am they locked half of us in conference rooms and told us that everyone who wasn't in a conference room was getting laid off. We weren't allowed to leave the conference rooms for an hour out of "respect" for everyone gathering their stuff into boxes and they said that the security was there for "our safety". Thoma Bravo is currently bleeding that company dry and running it on a skeleton crew while it slowly circles the drain.
This experience has made me super wary of private equity firms in general but this company in particular.
Or Riverbed.
Having several similar products ... you know what it means: https://thomabravo.com/portfolio/all/current/