Your regular fix of the best guests from the world of data and analytics. This is The Data Mix with Brian Bdden and George Peter.
Hey everyone and welcome to yet another episode of The Data Mix. We are here in Orlando, Florida at Qlik Connect with Qlik CEO Mike Capone. I feel like I should say hello even though I've seen you several times already today.
Let's do it. Let's do it for the audience.
And the floor, Mike. Let's start with the floor. How are you feeling about this whole vibe? It feels so nice and tight and compact and everyone's getting to know each other well. So how are you feeling about all that?
I feel great. Look, you called it. We got the exact right size space. The energy is great. You can feel it. I walked the floor earlier, said hello to all the exhibitors, and they're thrilled. It's coming off really well. They're getting lots of traffic. Our keynote this morning went well, so it's feeding into the excitement here. All great.
Well, we'll get on to the keynote in a second, but I think that warm feeling definitely is present. I feel that, and not just the physical aspect. There's a lot of energy in the room, and it's always great to see. It's one of the best things about being at Connect. But moving on to the keynote, wow, what a reception for that this morning. It was quite something to be a part of that. When the ripples of applause come out, it never gets old. So for those of us who maybe didn't see the live, what went on this morning? What were some of the major announcements that happened here at Connect?
Yeah. Well, the good news is we did record it, so it'll eventually be available for replay. I encourage people to go watch it. But there's a couple of things. One, it's us explaining how we see the world. The way we see the world is maybe different than others. Everyone's talking about agents, but the reality is agents don't work unless you have really good data and really good analytics underpinning them. So resetting everybody: you got to do the work, you got to get the data right. Then jumping into our new product announcements. One was our agent framework, which is different than others. Some application providers are talking about making restaurant reservations; that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about end-to-end agentic capabilities across our entire platform: data integration, data governance, data quality, and analytics. The second was Qlik Open Lakehouse, the ability to harness Iceberg technology and deliver AI at a better cost point.
Yeah. Both of those things are really important. I think it's really important to reference that word agent again. It's a bit like we talked about AI in depth with AI council last year. Agentic is the word of the year this year. But like you said, it means something different for Qlik. I think a lot of people were hoping coming into the conference that we would hear about that magical join between structured and unstructured. True to form, that's more what agentic means from Qlik's perspective: tying those things together to make a seamless experience. Talk a little bit about that process for you and how it's gone.
It's always been the vision. Thank you for bringing it up because it is a big part of our story. Again, it starts with agents don't work unless you've got good data. We've had Qlik Answers in the market, the unstructured data product, for quite some time. But now we've announced the ability to leverage structured and unstructured data together. We demoed some really good examples: taking structured data from an order management system and unstructured data from social feeds, putting that together to make smarter decisions and trigger agents. That's really important, and you can do that now across the entire platform. We think we've got something incredibly unique in the market. What you're seeing and hearing from the people you're talking to is that excitement.
I think that word seamless really strikes me. Before, when you've acquired and integrated and white-labeled, you've done that super efficiently and been very good at promising and delivering. With Qlik Answers, we've got a massive head start with a lot of that platform in place. I was really excited to see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff yesterday: dropping an app into that Answers framework and suddenly seeing structured and unstructured data together. I think it's really exciting. The last thing I'll mention is that it was super cool that you're utilizing the existing Answers framework. It's not learning a new thing; it's a native progression. You must work a lot on making sure it's a seamless experience rather than just new functionality for the market.
Completely. Look, it's a religion for us. We don't buy a capability or a company unless we know how we're going to integrate it and make it seamless in our platform. It's really important to us. I was just with an analyst right before this, and they complimented us: 'We've never seen a company so fervent about making acquisitions seamless and part of the platform and sticking to it.' Everyone says they're going to do it, but then things get hard and they give up. We don't. Qlik was a great example of that. Halver, which we acquired in January, will be another example. That's why we don't launch the product until ready. We'll say it's not till July because we're going to finish making it native to our platform.
I think having that native experience is massive. You do a terrific job of telling us about the logos you've acquired and then giving us something that feels like Qlik. That's the big thing: it feels like Qlik. In terms of the other announcement you talked about, Upsolver and Iceberg, those words might feel alien to some of the analytics market because the architecture is deeper and faster. Some of the figures quoted on performance impact... tell us a little about that. That middle layer is incredibly important to Qlik.
It's incredibly important. One of the things happening right now is AI is getting expensive. Companies are starting to see 12 months of bills trying to build out AI infrastructure and realizing it's unsustainable. We have to find the right technology for the right use cases. Apache Iceberg, that open-source format, is a great way to leverage lower-cost storage to store data and have it accessible for AI at high volume. We used to talk about our data integration platform doing 17 million rows a second, and we thought that was great. Now we can do hundreds of millions of rows a second. We can stream data off mobile devices. Where are you going to store that? You can't store it in a database; it's crazy. Iceberg is a great way to do that. We're also seeing this fight for independence: departments want to build their own data pipelines. They don't want to wait. With Qlik Talend Cloud, you can set up an AI data pipeline in an Iceberg format and use Qlik on top of it, enabling them really quickly.
Exactly. Hearing the keynote, I think a lot of people are keen to adapt their schedules to understand more about how that flows with the agentic side and Upsolver. The buzz in the room was terrific this morning. Congrats on that. In terms of incorporating that into packaging, Mike, that's the question on people's lips. We've heard the announcements, and we've been through a process with capacity and adding other things into the packaging. How do you see that from a holistic view? How is it all going to hang together?
Yeah, we want transparency. We want customers to understand what they're paying for and never pay for something they're not using. That's what capacity pricing is about: paying for what you use. If you need more, you can get more, but you can also control it. We give you all the tools to control it. We're super transparent about how we price and package things. The nice thing is our products work together really well. But we're completely open. If you choose to use our data platform but not our analytics platform, that's totally fine. Our pricing reflects that.
I think it's required in the market nowadays. As more component parts are added, people need to be able to buy that package. That formula is coming back to the market a lot. First it was subscription, now it's packaging. People don't want to understand all the disparate parts; they just want to click and go. The combination of packaging and add-ons is quite strategic now. What's the process been like working that out? What goes into packaging?
Well, we talk to our customers. We ask them how they would buy. We have an executive advisory board; they're here meeting right now. When we roll out big initiatives or tweak pricing, we talk to customers: 'Do you want to bundle it? Do you think it's better to buy individually? If we bundle it, what would it look like and how much are you willing to pay?' That informs what we do. Qlik Talend Cloud is a great example. For a while we sold data integration and data governance separately, but customers started saying it's one thing to us. They didn't want to buy a data integration tool and data governance separately; they wanted one bundle. So that's what we did.
The feedback loop for that is super important. You mentioned customers, but I know firsthand you have a very strong partner community. The partner community has a real influence on what you do. I know of several occasions where feedback was given and acted on. I sat down with Drew last night, and the thing I liked is the open and inclusive culture Qlik has. Qlik leadership is really open. That's something you're keeping top of mind, right?
Absolutely. We have multiple levels of feedback. Ambassador meetings, luminaries is another great one. We have all these enthusiastic customers and partners, but also very vocal ones. We choose them that way intentionally. We want the ones who will speak up, not just say they love Qlik. You saw it today: time series. 'How long have you guys been telling us about that?' Here it is. We do listen to customers. It's not always fun, but it works. Today you're seeing a lot of the results of that.
