I consult for QlikView and I have to agree it’s awesome. But hearing me rant about its greatness would sound like another fanboy foaming at the mouth. So I’ll let someone else, David Raab, explain why QlikView is so good. David has also put together a concrete example using a cross-sell table that answers the question “What other products do customers tend to buy if/when they purchase product X?” This is a powerful question that every sales person should be asking, but it’s hard to get an answer when you need to go to the IT department each time and wait for them to build the model in a traditional SQL query or OLAP tool. QlikView makes it easy to get immediate answers and explore your data “at the speed of thought”.
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Salesforce.com’s Force and SAP’s A1S
Two announcements this week, all centered around small and mid-market applications built on flexible platforms. Force.com from Salesforce.com is a rebranding of their technology with a focus beyond CRM applications. This article mentions some promising case studies including 45,000 users running on the Salesforce.com platform already. That’s the Japanese post office, so obviously internationalization isn’t an issue. Not everyone is convinced of Salesforce.com’s potential. Joshua Greenbaum thinks that SAP’s A1S, to be announced on Sept 19th, will be the one to beat.
Either way, I’m pretty excited. On-demand, software-as-a-service business software platforms with straightforward development tools have incredible potential. Highly-tailored applications are the way to go, but you don’t want to be caught in the low-level details of databases and web service implementation.