While Attunity’s smaller channel, which is principally SI’s, will realize more significant and elastic capabilities through Qlik, Qlik’s legacy channel, which is much larger, will reap new data integration capabilities. This is something Qlik sees as vital because of where they believe the analytics market is headed.
Drew Clarke, SVP, Office of Strategy Management at Qlik
Today, data analytics provider Qlik announced the acquisition of Attunity, which makes data integration and big data management software solutions. The deal is for approximately $560 million, has been unanimously approved by both boards, and is expected to close in the second quarter. For Qlik, it is an acquisition of great significance, which makes their platform more agile, and strengthens them in the data integration space, where they see their own market headed. Qlik also sees the deal as significant for the channel partners of both companies, and Qlik’s much larger channel will benefit from being able to offer clients a data lake story as well as a pure analytics one.
“Analytics are only as good as the data provided,” said Drew Clarke, SVP, Office of Strategy Management at Qlik. “With the growing shift to data lakes, we are seeing an increased demand from customers to be able to provide current up-to-date data, in real time, for our analytics capabilities. That’s what Attunity does very well. Attunity feeds the data lake, and in a real time basis. They are also good at doing it in a lightweight, low latency way, using change data capture. So the data goes from raw to ready to optimized for analytics. These two companies together really are a case of one plus one equals three.”
Qlik’s strength, historically, has been those core data analytics and visualization capabilities.
“We are a 25-year old business intelligence company with 48,000 customers,” Clarke said. “The first generation of companies in our space were ones like Cognos, Business Objects, and Oracle. We are one of the second-generation BI companies, who place a much greater emphasis on self-serve analytics than the first generation. Our greatest market has been departmental LANs within large companies, but we have smaller customers, who have multiple data centres who need to do more robust analytics. It’s not the size of the company that matters as much as the number of data sources coming in.”
Qlik’s acquisition of Attunity, along with the previous purchase of Podium Data last year, reflects Qlik’s strategic objective of moving to where they see the market is headed.
“We are developing a more modern, agile platform,” Clarke said. “We have been a long-time leader in the upper right of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business intelligence, where we have been the market leader for nine years. “Attunity is in the data integration Gartner Magic Quadrant, in the upper left of that quadrant [the challengers’ section]. That’s where we believe that our market is going. A good metaphor would be that this combination will help us skate to where the puck is going.”
That’s very good news for Qlik’s channel partners. Most of Attunity’s business has been direct, although they have some key partnerships, particularly with global systems integrators. Qlik has a much broader channel.
“We have over 1700 partners, who provide over half of our revenues,” Clarke said. “Our partners provide us with the footprint that gives us customers in over 100 countries. We have a core group of solution providers, but are also strong partners with the global system integrator community, and have a robust OEM business, with companies embedding our platform as part of their solution. Attunity has made a strong focus on the Azure and AWS marketplaces. We have not had as significant a presence there. That will provide new capabilities in addition to the broader integration capabilities of their products that will also be leveraged by our partner ecosystem. We anticipate that the close of this deal in Q2 will coincide with our big global Qonnections event [May 13-16 in Dallas].”
Clarke also stressed Qlik partners will be able to offer a fuller story to their customers through the Attunity technology.
“For Qlik partners, as they work with customers who demand faster and more real-time analytics, this platform will answer that need,” he said. “It’s an exciting new tool for them. It will also allow our partners to broaden their engagement with their clients. They now have not just an analytics story but a data lake story. It will let them deliver more value.”
For Attunity partners, particularly those moving large amounts of data to the cloud, Qlik will provide additional value as well.
“The Qlik platform works with Kubernetes and is very elastic, which is highly valuable for those working with cloud platforms because of its scale-out capability,” Clarke said. “They will be able to deliver greater analytics capability.”
