Analytics provider Lavastorm is partnering with Qlik, a provider of visual analytics software, to offer an integrated solution for a broader swath of users of all skill levels through Qlik Sense.
Nearly half of Lavastorm’s existing customers are leveraging Qlik to create interactive data visualizations, according to Dan Donovan, VP of Financial Services at Lavastorm. With the new partnership, the companies are building an integrated platform that can be used to build advanced analytic applications that can be navigated intuitively and harness the power of both solutions without disrupting the user experience.
The combined approach is currently in its early stages and is just coming out of R&D, said Donovan. With this announcement the companies are introducing and making public a working prototype of the eventual product functionality. At the moment, the integration works within the framework of Qlik Sense extensions on the Qlik side, and makes use of Lavastorm APIs on the Lavastorm side. The eventual go-to-market plan is to have both companies co-marketing this functionality and there are already early adopter customers interested in being in the first wave of users, Donovan noted.
With the new integration, Qlik Sense users can take advantage of Lavastorm’s Agile ETL and Advanced Analytics directly through the Qlik Sense user interface for business processes such as sales forecasting, pricing trend analysis and understanding buyer behavior. For example, the companies say, a dashboard showing actual sales data would be able to incorporate predictive forecasting as well - or, bubble charts might incorporate clustering functionality. This will enable business users to now be able to conduct more of this research on their own without the help of a data analyst. “The Lavastorm analysis actually pulls data live from what Qlik calls the hypercube data structure that is underneath its visualizations so there is no need to pull as a file or anything like that,” said Donovan.
The new integration with Qlik delivers data analysis for non-technical users via the intuitive Qlik user interface that they experience every day so that they can more quickly and easily benefit from advanced analytics. Examples of advanced analytics that can now be integrated directly into Qlik Sense applications include linear and logistic regressions, affinity analysis, and market basket analysis.
There is an overall increased awareness of advanced analytics and business users are a lot more savvy now than they were before - and products like Qlik Sense are largely responsible for that, said Donovan. “People realize that there is a lot more that they can do with data than just putting it in a spreadsheet.” However, this realization that more can be done with data is also causing a bottleneck within organizations because there will never be enough data scientists or enough technical people to go around to field the number of user requests, and that is what this new integration seeks to address, said Donovan.
To learn more, visit www.lavastorm.com and www.qlik.com.