Data Strategy Advancement, Agentic Innovation, & More from Qlik Connect – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Steven FoST, organizer of the Tech Field Day Event series, and here are my takeaways from the Tech Field Day experience at Click Connect. Click Connect is always a brilliant event because of the great set of customers and data analytics and now AI luminaries that attend. Frankly, even without the click content, I would go to click connect, but of course they always have a lot more to share and a lot more to announce at these events.

This year was no different. With them talking, uh, in great detail about the evolution of AI from LLMs to rag to Agentic, uh, increase of, uh, focus on analytics and uh, how they're feeding analytics applications with increasing data, and most importantly, the importance of enabling business users to access, uh, data, information and insights from their data warehouses and data lakes. As companies in the data and analytics industry have improved the quality of insights from their applications through, uh, plain old programming and software development, as well as ai, one thing has been clear and that is that analytics applications need quality data in order to deliver quality results.

Qlik has acquired many companies in the data space over the years from Attunity, blender, Talend and Kindy, and these were all focused on bringing increasing data and processing that data, preparing that data, organizing it so that it can be useful to analytics applications. This year was no different with Qlik announcing in January that they acquired UPS Solver, which is really focused on high speed integration of data into data lake type environments. Along with optimizing that data for use, we saw a great deal of the capability of this product during our tech field day presentations, as well as on stage showing that the access to data is critical.

And of course this reflects the conversations that I'm having with many companies in the data and analytics space, as well as many other acquisitions we've seen. In 2025, Qlik has always been focused on making data useful for business users, but that was really amplified this year. Many of the demonstrations on the floor at Qlik Connect focused on how business users can get insight from their data, how they can query it, and how they can access it without needing an intermediary data scientist.

The push that Qlik is talking about this year also is focused on enabling access, giving them the ability to query and integrate structured and semi-structured data through natural language interactions. Qlik answers has continued to evolve to help customers talk to their data, and of course, Qlik has really focused on the issue of data quality, whether it was RAG or agentic applications. The most important message we heard all week long was the importance of a trusted and secure data foundation.

Last year's discussion of the Cloud was focused, uh, mainly on Click's, Talend Cloud, but this year we heard a lot more about, uh, integration with partners, especially companies like AWS. The new Open Data Lake house concept that they announced is built on open standards like the Apache iceberg, and this allows it to integrate seamlessly with partners like AWS and others. We also saw impressive demonstrations of, um, interoperability between Qlik and other data and analytics companies, including a, uh, three-way presentation with Qlik, AWS and Snowflake.

It seems that, uh, companies are wanting to use things like, uh, the foundational models and AWS Bedrock, but are concerned on making sure that those are accessing data in a controlled and secure way. And Qlik and AWS went to great pains to assure us that that was indeed the case. The company, of course, also continues to enhance the Talend Cloud and bring in the partners that had been working with Talend prior to that acquisition into the overall click ecosystem.

Again, this is really a partner focused company and that reflects how companies are using data and analytics products today. Qlik Connect 2025 was a continuation of what we expect to see from Qlik, lots of focus on end user companies, practical applications, and of course data and analytics integration. This year, of course, had a healthy dose of ai and I say healthy because the company, of course is very focused on, uh, having a quality foundation for data future of intelligence.

Research shows that companies are increasingly focused on the areas of AgTech and RAG as a way to bring more value from the data that they have already collected. With almost 90% of CEOs reporting recently that they intend to use Ag agentic to accelerate their business transformation that matches what we heard from people on the ground in Orlando. Many of the CIOs I spoke with echoed these findings showing that they are very, very keen on using AI to automate tasks, to improve productivity, and to enhance customer experience.

If you're interested, I strongly recommend checking out the click uh, presentations on the Tech Field Day channel and you know, look at the futureum intelligence reports from our analysts where we talk in depth about AI and Agentic ai. If you'd like to continue this conversation with me, find me on LinkedIn or social media as s Foskett, or check out the Tech Field Day and utilizing tech podcasts in your favorite podcast application. Thanks for watching this episode of the Tech Field Day takeaways series on the Tech Field, a plus YouTube channel.

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