QlikTech’s New iPad Client Ain’t No ‘Dumb Pad’
April 26, 2011 Alex Woodie
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QlikTech began delivery of a new iPad interface that turns the popular Apple device into a truly interactive client for working with QlikView business intelligence applications. The new product represents a big improvement over the static “dumb pads” that characterized first-generation attempts to build BI clients for the iPad, a QlikTech executive says. “First-generation iPad BI apps turn iPads into ‘dumb pads’,” says Anthony Deighton, QlikTech senior vice president of products for the Radnor, Pennsylvania-based BI software company. “They may have good-looking visuals, but their limited views, predefined paths, pre-canned reports, and lack of up-to-date data mean they aren’t always the smartest solutions,” he continues. By comparison, the new QlikView on iPad represents a “smart pad” approach that meshes well with the QlikTech’s popular Windows-based BI software, he says. Save for the iPad-specific gestures and commands, the new app, running in Apple’s Safari Web browser, looks and functions very similarly to the company’s other browser-based interfaces. The QlikView user interface and the relative simplicity it affords to working with BI data has been one of reasons for QlikTech’s success in recent years, including a big IPO last July. By all accounts, the company’s slick user interface, which allows users to create different views of data on the fly, meshes very nicely with its speedy in-memory associative database. While the setup doesn’t let users do some of the things that heavier on-line analytical processing (OLAP) systems can do, QlikTech’s combination of features, price, and ease of use has obviously hit a note with users, including IBM i shops. The new tablet interface for the iPad continues this heritage, QlikTech says. “It lets users explore information up, down and sideways, make any associations they choose, and precisely customize so it maps 100 percent to their individual requirements,” Deighton says. RELATED STORIES Qlik Technologies to Take Itself Public QlikTech Ships BI Client for Google Android Phones QlikTech Continues BI Industry Leadership with QlikView 9 QlikTech Develops a BI Client for iPhone BI Vendor QlikTech Celebrates Success QlikTech Aims to Ease Large BI Roll-Outs QlikView Saved Candle Maker Millions QlikTech Targets iSeries Base with Business Intelligence App
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