Qlik’s Successful Year in 2024: Achieving Sales and Profitability Targets

Written by GOODIN BI Lead Phuoc Tran Minh

Qlik had a highly successful year in 2024, meeting both its sales and profitability targets. The critical Talend integration was executed successfully, and cross-selling has driven growth, with Talend customers showing interest in Qlik and vice versa.

Previously, one of Qlik’s major challenges was the high costs and weak profitability of Qlik Cloud. However, last year, it achieved the “Rule of 50” benchmark, which is considered a key indicator of a successful SaaS company: ARR (annual recurring revenue) growth% + cash EBITDA% > 50%.

This success has also benefited its majority owner, Thomas Bravo, which, according to analysts, has increased Qlik’s valuation to approximately $10 billion and successfully sold a significant 10% minority stake. Additionally, Qlik’s CEO revealed that Thoma Bravo has further increased its own investment in Qlik—an important commitment to maintaining rapid technological development.

Further evidence of this investment strategy was seen in Qlik’s recent acquisition of Upsolver, a company specialising in real-time data streaming. Upsolver offers both high performance and competitive cost efficiency, strengthening Qlik’s already comprehensive data platform and reinforcing its position as a leading open data lakehouse solution committed to open Iceberg technology.

“What’s New’ product highlights presented in Qlik Sales Kick-Off.

Data Platform Credibility and the Future of Qlik

A strong and credible position as a data platform is essential for Qlik’s future and for investor confidence. This was a key theme at the recent Sales Kickoff, where significant new features related to Trust Score and Data Products were showcased.

It is now time to put to rest the persistent myth that Qlik is not suitable for creating data transformations or a semantic layer that need to be shared outside the Qlik platform—for example, for data scientists. This challenge has always been overestimated but in recent years Qlik Automation and Talend developments have enabled solving even the most complex integration needs. Furthermore, I continue to emphasise the efficiency of Qlik’s traditional data load scripting, particularly for smaller environments and in agile full-stack development & minimum viable product (MVP) scenarios. A simple adjustment—storing data in Parquet format instead of QVD—enables modern databases like Snowflake to perform highly efficient SQL queries directly on the data files.

The Battle for Generative AI: Qlik Answers’ Success and Evolution

Another key battleground is Generative AI (GenAI). Qlik Answers surpassed its sales targets last year and will see numerous new features this year. It appears set to replace (or merge with?) the current Insight Advisor, expanding to leverage structured data and integrating seamlessly into Qlik’s interface—revolutionising mobile usage in particular.

I personally experienced a moment of success with Qlik Answers just last week: I was able to get its newly released API working in just 15 minutes using Postman. This confirmed that Qlik Answers does not require a user licence or even a user account—making it easy to integrate into public websites or into Qlik’s data loading scripts. I also tested its ability to understand and respond in fluent Finnish, allowing us to move forward with our first customer pilot.

Small but Significant Improvements for Everyday BI Development

While major announcements like these are important, they are primarily targeted at media, investors, analysts, and large enterprises. From a practical BI development perspective, the continuous small but significant improvements in usability (flexible UI and easier integrations) and maintainability (pre-built automation templates and monitoring applications) are perhaps even more important.

One of my personal favourites was a completely unexpected improvement that solves a long-standing problem: how to easily create and maintain documentation for a Qlik application. I highly recommend trying DocuGen automation, which generates documentation as a standalone HTML page.

Example of documentation created by DocuGen: “Data Model” page.

Example of documentation created by DocuGen: “Sheets & Visualizations” page.

The Sales Kickoff showcased an exciting future for Qlik, but for current customers, the most valuable insight comes from this slide that summarizes Qlik’s main achievements:

Ultimately, Qlik’s excellence is not about any single technical feature, but its superiority stems precisely from Gartner’s recognition of Qlik as a “formidable end-to-end data to decision platform” which enables the full-stack BI developer & key user rapid co-creation model and explains Qlik’s high customer satisfaction & Customers’ Choice 2024 award. Contact us if you want to hear more about what we at GOODIN mean by co-creation and how it can accelerate the construction of complex data platforms!Want more information?

Contact us: https://goodin.fi/#contact