Qlik Connect 2025 Welcome and Introduction

So, uh, welcome. Thanks so much for, for, uh, taking the time to, to join us today. My name's, uh, Josh Goode.

I'm the Vice President of Strategy and Market Development here at Qlik. So that means I spend all my time thinking about what's the next thing we're gonna be doing? How are we gonna move into the market?

What's gonna happen with ai not next week, next, you know, next month, next quarter, more like next year, three years out, four years out, and, and so forth. So, I'm gonna kick off just a, a quick little bit about how we're thinking about the whole market, and then we'll dive down really deep into what we're doing here, um, and, and get into those, those tech really that the technical stuff with some great things from, from our presenters. This is an overview of the, uh, of the agenda today.

And, um, here's all the speakers who you'll see so you know, who's coming up and, and who they are. Um, and it's nice just to have it all and, and, you know, any of them would be happy to connect with you after, you know, hit them up on social media as, as, as we already already mentioned. Um, and yeah, so this, we're at click Connect just for anyone who missed that.

Uh, and, uh, and thank you for coming down to Orlando. Um, we will be doing one next year. We'll announce where that's gonna be, and it's gonna be almost as good as this one.

No, no. It, it, they'll, they'll be better every, every year. Uh, but first, where I'll start is, is what's right at the top is, is what's our vision and, and, and what's our, our, our strategic goal.

And I think the strategic goal visions are really nice and they tell you what we're doing, but when you look at the strategic goal, that's what Qlik is actively working towards as a business and how we're trying to, to, to, to, um, to really make these impacts with using data analytics and ai, um, to really solve tough problems and, and not just problems that are, um, you know, uh, inherent to the, uh, to, to, to, to our customers, but also like the, it ultimately works out to solving some of the world's toughest challenges, whether it's around poverty or whether it's around transportation and logistics. These are all really important things that, that affect, um, uh, people every day. Uh, and, you know, we've been doing a lot of progress on that, and I'm really excited.

So I thought it would be worthwhile just to bring up a few of the announcements that we didn't. This is just the last 12 months and, you know, some highlights there. Uh, you know, click Answers was launched, um, click Talent Cloud was launched.

Um, we, we, we did, uh, the AI reality tour, which was, you know, we went all over the world to, to, to talk about, um, what we're do we're doing. We acquired UPS Solver. Um, we also did some really great things for our customers.

Uh, we launched two new cloud regions. Um, we've had, uh, you know, numerous enhancements that come out regularly, um, in, in all in all of our products. And then another more recent thing is, uh, we just announced, we closed a, um, a, a new investment.

And it's interesting, new investment is, um, uh, idea came in, um, as an investor with Qlik and our, our current primary, uh, owner, uh, Tomma Bravo, they reinvested, which is really, really, uh, rare when, um, for a, for an organization like Tooma Bravo to come in and not only, you know, be with a click for so many years, but then come in again and say, you know, we're so confident in what's happening. And as somebody who thinks about strategy, I thought that was a really interesting external validation about what, um, for those of you don't know me, I actually came from the product side, so I really wanna get to the product stuff. But, uh, knowing that we're, what we're doing is not just being validated by the techies, but also by the wider market, uh, is really a good sign that, that, that we're, we're on the right track.

And when we look at being on the right track, I think a lot about what are the trends in the market. And, um, we have a whole trends, um, publication we put out every year. And I pulled three of the, I think the, the really, the, the thrusting, um, uh, push around where the trends are coming from.

And the first one, of course is agents, as everyone's heard of an agent. Yeah. You know, it's, it's amazing how agent has completely replaced Gen ai, um, what people are talking about in terms of hype.

Um, and that's gonna, you know, if agents are fundamentally gonna change the way we we operate, um, as a species, um, not just in the data and analytics space as a species, it's, it's gonna be a big, big change. We know that. But the other, there's a, a counterpoint that's happening on that, what we find really interesting, which is around applied value.

So we've mo what we're, what we're seeing is we've moved beyond the hype in terms of getting the, of ai. And, and now there's a lot of questions about applying value, and are you actually getting that value that reaches back into to auth authenticity? Uh, so is the, um, the value we're getting authentic, but also is the data that we're using, um, authentic is are we getting real business results, or are we getting, you know, AI hype, uh, out of things?

And when we look at how we're thinking about what we're doing with Qlik is we, we look at it from a lot of different angles, but you can see like data readiness is a huge theme that you'll hear throughout the conference here. And actually you've been hearing for quite a while from Qlik. And, and that ties right into that authenticity trend, uh, that that's, that's been discussed.

Um, and then also being business focused. You know, Qlik itself, I've been with Qlik for, uh, it'll be 15 years in December. Um, and, and we've always been very business focused around driving that value out to the, to the, to the, from the data.

So it's, you know, it's not about how much data you have, it's how much value you're gonna get from your data, is how we think about it. Uh, and there's lots of pieces along the value chain that, that need to be delivered in order to, to, to, to do that. Uh, and that just ties right into the applied value.

And, um, and, and then the, the last is, you know, everything needs to be timely. And, and, uh, we think about fast action. You know, the, uh, the tragedy of data and analytics is the amount of work that's done, and then the number of times someone goes, Hmm, I'll just go with my gut at the end of it.

Uh, and so being able to take action directly from that analysis, uh, and that we, we see agents as a real big, uh, opportunity, uh, to do that. So, you know, how are we gonna plug agents right into the analysis and enable, uh, our, our customers to take direct action from that? And then also, how can agents make it easier for that entire to, to be utilized?

So, you know, you're, you're lowering the, uh, the effort you need to put in to get the value, the value out. Uh, when we look at where we're gonna pull the, the, the levers for value, there's five levers we're pulling at click to help our customers get more value. And some of 'em are a little bit more about Qlik, and some of them are more about specifically about the software, but I think they all interrelate really, um, really well.

So the first is our capacity model for, for those of you who aren't totally familiar with it, we've moved all of our cloud software to a capacity based model. So that means you buy a capability, a certain amount to do the various things you're gonna do, whether it's moving data, whether it's it's doing data quality, whether it's doing analysis, whether it's running, uh, uh, models, and you have up to that amount that you can, you can do. So you're not, you're not always on a meter, you're not always worried about, you know, am I I'm gonna, what's the bill gonna be?

Um, and, and, but you know what? You more have the right amount that you need. And then, you know, over time, if you change your use cases, you know, you'll, you'll, you can, you can purchase additional, but it also means that we include a lot more capabilities in the product.

'cause you know, um, the funny thing, like I'll, I'll use car buying as an example. You know, you know, they always, you know, the traditional thing is to show you the engine and tell you how great the engine is. And why do you love the car?

You love the car for the cup holders, right? You know, you don't know what that thing is. You're gonna love it for the same thing's true with software, right?

You, you, you purchase software often for, for a reason, and it delivers on that. But the reasons you love it, and the reason it's a game changer isn't always the way you quite, you quite understood when you, when you purchase the software. So we're taking that, that approach of making many more capabilities available to our customers and using this capacity model and unlimited users so that the organization can get full value out of the software, and also experiment with more use cases as they come up the cross sell.

That that's our, our efforts as we brought, uh, Qlik and talent and we brought a Trinity in. Um, we, we have customers who traditionally came from data integration, and customers traditionally came from analytics. And we're doing a whole lot in the products.

And in our way, we're going into market to help it, to make it easier for customers to utilize those capabilities across the entire platform. And that gives them more value. We're seeing actually consolidation in the market where, um, the best in breed, the modern data stack approach.

Um, customers are finding that that's too difficult to integrate, and they're looking for less vendors. Uh, and Qlik is perfectly positioned as a, uh, independent vendor who has a end-to-end platform to be able to do that. So we're exposing that more to, to our customers.

We're also accelerating the transition to cloud. A lot of the innovation is coming to cloud. And, uh, you know, we announced that, um, we have new tooling available now, uh, uh, with, uh, stretch Connect, uh, that we just acquired, as well as the other announcements around, um, providing, um, free tenants to our customers who are currently on prem so they can start experimenting with cloud and additional investments in terms of helping our customers move to cloud.

Uh, and then of course, we're all in on ai. I mean, being all in on AI is an easy thing to say, but as you've seen with the announcements that we've, uh, we've come out with around click answers around our new age agentic, uh, framework, uh, and also the AI we're putting directly into the product to assist, uh, um, with using our, our products is, is a, a big, big effort that that, that we're working here. And, you know, we'll hear a whole section on that, um, later.

And then the last thing is really not technically focused, but is, um, is so essential to success in technology, is the ecosystem and clicks the organization at Click as well. So we put a lot of effort into the way our go to market works, the way our services delivery, um, happens, and also our partner ecosystem so that there's an oppor there's, um, a, a, a better chance of success or a more likely chance of success. And more importantly is when things go kind of off the rails, which un you know, unfortunately, you know, you're pushing the boundaries.

Sometimes things don't go according to the way you hoped. Um, we have those capabilities to help right, that ship with our customers. And we have a, I I call them, um, you know, bonding events.

Um, you know, where, where things don't go quite as you might have planned, but we wanna make sure we're there every step away with our customers. And it ties right back, if you know, into the capacity model. 'cause that whole model is built around customers having success and wanting to do more with our products.

So we have to make sure we, we have that whole ecosystem. That thing I love about the way this is all set up is it's in clicks incentivized to make sure the customers are successful, um, so that the customers, you know, stick and stay with Click, um, in the long term, which works, works well for Click as a business, but also is what our, our ultimate, uh, focus is. And when you look at our platform, you know, you've probably seen this slide four or 500 times.

Um, you know, this is our entire platform, whether you're working from the, the AI Foundation where you're making your data ready. And that's our data quality and, and our data integration capabilities to the, to the AI solutions, uh, which is our, our analytics and AI capabilities and how that all comes together. And we have, um, AI helping run all of that and underpin all of that and as well as key capabilities there.

And then very importantly, the larger ecosystem of our partners. And you're gonna hear actually, you know, our, our partnerships are so important. The next presentation won't be click people.

We're gonna have AWS come up and, and be part of this. 'cause we really, you know, that's foundational is nobody uses technology inside a, um, uh, inside a vacuum. The interesting thing about our platform is how adaptable and open it is though.

And, um, I put together this slide, and this is a history of how our platform's been built. And you'll notice that there's an equal amount, or, or I dunno if it's equal, but you could say there's a, there's a good amount of organic and inorganic growth. And that's one of click's superpowers is we've worked really hard to have great innovation internally, but then also know that all good ideas don't start necessarily with us.

And there's always opportunities to bring in other technologies. And we've moved from being a, you know, a a a full enterprise class analytics platform to where we are today, which is, you know, a platform for customer ai, uh, uh, and to get our customers to be able to enable them to be successful in ai. Whether that means using ai, getting data ready for ai, innovating, using our ai, or integrating with, with their own AI or other third, third party ai.

And you can see how that, that stepping has gone and in terms of it's always looks nicer with the, uh, um, logos, but the bottom stuff of all the, the organic is really there. And then the, the right hand side is where we are today and where we're innovating and some of the opportunities that, that we see, uh, while we innovate, you know, this year and and beyond. Josh, um, you, you, uh, click, click, you know, pretty much as a natural extension of what you guys have been doing.

You moved into ai, um, comparatively speaking with everything moving at lightning speed right now. Actually quite a while ago, I think Big Squid was like 2020 or something. Uh, so actually, yeah, if you want to get, so 2018.

Oh, so yeah, big Squid was 20, quid 20. But we did Crunch Data, which was a chat bot, which turned into Click Insight Advisor in 2018. And actually the associative engine uses machine learning to, to figure out what it does.

So we've actually been doing AI since 1993, if you want to like really pull it Back. Well, yeah, yeah. But yeah, there's lots of folks who are saying quite correctly that AI's been around quite some time.

I think the big difference is generative AI in the large language models and that sort of thing. Um, and that's leads to my question, which is there's a little bit of market confusion over this sort of, people hear AI right now, they just think generative AI and large language models. Yeah.

Um, how are you working with customers so that they understand the, the predictive AI routes that really help them with the core offer versus the generative AI that ex enhances what they're doing, enhances their user experience, that sort Of thing? Yeah, so we talk about using all ai, um, and we talk about predictive ai, um, which is we, some people call it traditional ai, but that's all, all of that, that basket there. And, and goes back to, uh, click Predict, which was called uh, click auto ML before.

And you know, we had the big squid heritage as you as, as you mentioned. Um, and then we talk about generative ai. 'cause you know, people want to hear about that.

And now we're talking about age agentic AI as well. So we're separating generative and and age agentic, um, as well. So we talk a lot about that.

And I know in our presentation here, and I can't remember it's my slides or I think it might be, uh, Nick's slides, Nick's raising his hand back there. Yeah. It's Nick's in Nick's slides.

He'll talk in more detail about how we're, we're highlighting that to our customers. And actually, um, Gartner says that over 50% of AI will be predictive ai, not generative ai. Um, and we, we agree with that.

Uh, so, so, but it, the, the, the way we to get right to the heart of your question, how do we, uh, enable customers to do that? We just put it right in the product and make it easy to use. And they don't really, like, they don't need to know in some ways like, is that generative ai?

Is that predictive ai? Just, you know, I don't know, I'm getting results from my business and I'm happy, right? And that, and that's impactful.

So we're trying to make the user experience really, really easy. So you just naturally use it. You don't do this big, like, now I'm gonna use AI and you know, it's just, oh no, I was using click and I used the stuff and it worked great and it helped me.

Does that mean putting layers on like auto ML for example, because that obvi that is a AI activity. Yeah. Yeah.

So like when we launched Auto ml, you had to go to the auto ML module and use it there and now, right? In the product today, and actually it was last year we announced it, we were doing some, um, some levels where we were running models in the background and then returning results to you, um, multi-variant time series is now Dr. Built right into there.

So you just, you know, click the button and bang, you have multi-variant time series, so you now you're doing AI with, with hitting a checkbox, right? So, so that's excellent. That's one aspect of it.

And then there's the other part we should talk about is all the integrations we do with other, other ais like, like Bedrock As well. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Um, so I'm running tight on time.

I wanna get to the technical stuff. So, you know, I, I thought it was worthwhile to, you know, just do a little bit of a brag slide here of like, you know, the results speak for themselves, right? Like, we're seeing really, really good results from our customers and this is, you know, using AI and, and using, using traditional data and analytics, um, as well.

And it's, it's pretty impressive on, on, on what, and I hope you all have a chance to, you know, talk to some of our customers around the show 'cause it's, uh, they're, they're an excited bunch. Um, and it's, it's really, really great to see and we think the future is, is pretty exciting as well. You know, so where I, where I see us going from a strategic perspective is we're gonna, you know, we're gonna do a whole lot more around ag agentic.

I mean, everyone's saying they're gonna do a whole lot more around ag agentic, but, you know, our announcements around our framework is proof of that. And what we see is, you know, with, um, click answers being the first thing that we're releasing on that new framework, the, the new version of click answers, uh, is um, has been a, a bunch of work, but now we have that framework and we're gonna be able to release things faster and faster, um, around the agent side. Um, uh, ai, uh, data readiness, we're, we're gonna put a whole lot of, of, of effort into, you know, making data AI ready, but also we will use AI to help you make data AI ready when the data prep, you know, finding anomalies, um, uh, recommendations, and then, you know, actually taking action on that.

And then the other is, and the, in the agent, we also, we see, we believe in the multi-agent architecture, we, we think there's gonna be multiple agents, click's gonna have agents that are the best at doing data and analytics, and then there's gonna be someone else who has agents who are doing other things. Um, that, uh, you know, we will, we'll also be able to, to, uh, to, um, to, to, to work with. And that, and that agent to agent connectivity we think is gonna be really key in the future.

'cause that's, that's gonna be the APIs of the future, uh, is, is kind of how I, I'm thinking about it. So without any further ado, um, if there's any other questions or anything, we can jump in if you have any other questions for me, otherwise I'm gonna pass it on, On the agent to agent connectivity. Yeah.

Or are you mainly looking towards the greater industry, like with what Google has on with their a to a protocol? Like where are you guys envisioning agent to agent, the, the center of gravity of that to be? I don't think we know that yet.

Um, you know, I think you'll see the hyperscalers Google AWS, they're gonna have their own agent. Salesforce has agent force, you know, they're all gonna have theirs. Mm-hmm.

Um, what I think is gonna happen is, is, you know, those hyperscalers, they'll have their own little, their e their own ecosystem. I can say little, it's not gonna be a little ecosystem level, very substantial ecosystem. Um, but what I think the other interesting thing that's gonna happen is, is you're gonna need to bring those ecosystems together and then there's gonna be new players as well.

And there's no one better to save me on this answer than our head of ai. I, I segue, segue to Nick and he could add to that, so, mm-hmm. Yeah, I, I would echo a couple things.

So yeah, I don't know that we know entirely what protocols are gonna be widely adopted. It does seem like MCP, right? Given the big names are now behind it.

We've got a AWS in the room, they're behind it. That's certainly something that we're, we're doing work on. Um, A two A as Google has put out also another very interesting way in which agents can CC communicate together.

Um, I foresee that that's gonna be a big thing. And then you've got agent marketplaces that are springing up, um, where I do think you're gonna have off the shelf agents that you can just grab and start using, integrate across the same ecosystem. So, um, it is still a bit early, but clearly people are putting a lot of investment in this area.

So I think it's something that, uh, you know, it's gonna, it's got legs.