Your regular fix of the best guests from the world of data and analytics. This is The Data Mix with Brian Budden 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 for the audience. 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 standing here. 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, and our keynote this morning went well, so it's feeding into the excitement here. So, all great.
Well, we'll get on to the keynote in a second, but that warm feeling is definitely 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. Moving on to the keynote, wow, what a reception this morning. It was quite something to be a part of that. When the ripples of applause come out, it never gets old. For those of us who maybe didn't see the live, what went on this morning? What were some of the major announcements at Connect?
Well, the good news is we did record it, so it'll eventually be available for replay. I encourage people who are interested to go watch it. But look, there's a couple of things. One, it's just us explaining how we see the world, and the way we see the world is maybe different than others. Everyone's talking about agents, yay agents, right? But the reality is agents don't work unless you have really good data and really good analytics underpinning them. So just resetting everybody, saying look, we understand, but you've got to do the work. You've got to get the data right. Then jumping into our new product announcements, which we're really excited about. One was our agentic framework, which is different than others. It's great 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. That platform: data integration, data governance, data quality, and analytics. And the second was Qlik Open Lakehouse, the ability to actually harness Iceberg tech capabilities and really deliver AI at a better cost point.
Yeah, and both of those things are really important. I think it's important to reference that word agentic today. It's a bit like we talked about AI in depth with the AI council here 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, I guess that's more what agentic means from Qlik's perspective, right? It's really tying those things together to make them a seamless experience. So just talk a little bit about that for me. How that process has been for you and how it's gone?
It's always been the vision, right? So yeah, and thank you for bringing it up because it is a big part of our story. And again, it starts with agents don't work unless you've got good data, and where are you going to get good data. We've had Qlik Answers in the market, the unstructured data product, for quite some time now. But now we've announced the ability to leverage structured and unstructured data together, and we demoed some really good examples of that. For example, taking structured data from an order management system, taking unstructured from your social feeds, putting that together to make smarter decisions and trigger agents. That's really, really important, and you can do that now across the entire platform. So we think we've got something incredibly unique in the market. And what you're seeing and hearing from the people that you're talking to, Brian, is just that excitement.
I think that word seamless really strikes me, because before, when you've acquired and integrated and white-labeled, you've done that super efficiently. You've been very good with promising and delivering, and it feels like with Qlik Answers we got a massive head start with having a lot of that platform from a physical perspective in place. So I was really excited to see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff yesterday, dropping an app into that Answers framework and all of a sudden being able to see that structured and unstructured data together. I think it's really exciting. And the last thing I'll mention on that is it was super cool that you're utilizing the existing Answers framework. So it's not like learning a new thing. It's just a native progression of what's going on. You must work a lot on that stuff, making sure it's a seamless experience rather than just new functionality for the market and for the analysts.
No, completely. And look, it's actually a religion for us, right? 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, really important to us. And it was funny, I was just with an analyst right before here, and they were complimenting us, saying, "We've never seen a company so fervent about making sure that the acquisitions become seamless and part of your platform, and then sticking to it." Everybody says they're going to do it, but then things get hard and they give up and they stop. We don't. Qlik Answers was a great example of us being able to do that. Upsolver, which we acquired in January, is going to be another example. And that's the reason we don't launch the product until it's ready. We'll say it's not till July, but that's because we're going to finish making it native to our platform.
I think having that native experience is a massive thing. And again, you do a terrific job of telling us about the logo you've acquired and then giving us something that we can see that just feels like Qlik. That's the big thing, right? It feels like Qlik. In terms of that other announcement, Upsolver, Iceberg, these might be words that feel slightly alien to some of the analytics market because the architecture is deeper and what it does is faster. But some of the figures that were quoted in terms of the performance impact and that type of thing. Tell us a little bit about that, because that middle layer is incredibly important to what Qlik sees.
It's incredibly important. And look, one of the things that's happening right now, as you all know, is AI is getting expensive. I think companies are starting to see 12 months' worth of bills of trying to build out their AI infrastructure and they're saying, "Wow, this is unsustainable." So we have to find the right technology for the right use cases. Apache Iceberg and that open-source format is a great way to leverage a lower cost of basically storage to be able to actually store data and have it accessible for AI at increasing 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 of mobile devices. Where are you going to store that? You can't store it in a database, it's crazy. So Iceberg is a great way to do that. And more and more, we're also seeing this fight for independence. Departments now want to build their own data pipelines. They don't want to wait. So the ability to set up an AI data pipeline with Qlik Talend Cloud, store it in an Iceberg format, and then use Qlik on top of it enables them really, really quickly.
Exactly. I think hearing the keynote, a lot of people are very keen to adapt their schedules now to understand more about how all that flow works with the agentic side and Upsolver. But the buzz in the room was terrific this morning, so congrats on that. In terms of the way we incorporate that into the packaging, Mike, I think that's the question on other people's lips as well. We've now heard the announcements and we've obviously just been through a bit of a process with capacity and then adding other things into the packaging. How do you see that from a holistic view, how that's all going to hang together?
Yeah, we want transparency, right? We want customers to really understand what they're paying for and never pay for something they're not using. That's really what capacity pricing is about, getting customers to a place where you pay for what you use. If you need more, you can go get more, but you can also choose to control it, and we give you all the tools to control it. We are super transparent about how we're going to price and package things. And the nice thing is, our products work together really, really well. But we're completely open. If you choose to use our data platform but not our analytics platform, totally fine. The opposite is totally fine as well, and our pricing reflects that.
Yeah, and 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 package formula, I think, is coming back to the market an awful lot now. First it was subscription, now it's packaging. People don't want to have to go out and understand what all these disparate parts are. They just want to be able to click and go, if you'll pardon the pun. But I think the combination of the packaging and the add-ons is quite strategic now. I think we see less of them but they provide a lot of value when you put them right. What's the process been like for that in terms of working that out? What goes into packaging?
Well, we talk to our customers, right? We say, how would you buy? We have an executive advisory board. They're here, they're actually meeting right now. When we roll out one of these big initiatives or even try to tweak our pricing, we talk to our customers and say, do you want to bundle it? Do you think it'd be better to buy individually? And if we bundle it, what would it look like and how much are you willing to pay? And then that informs what we do. Talent Cloud is a great example. For a while we sold data integration and data governance separately, but customers started to say, look, it's one thing to us. I don't want to buy a data integration tool, which was formerly Attunity, and separately data governance. Just give me one bundle. So that's what we do.
And the feedback loop for that is super important as well. You mentioned the customers, but I know from firsthand you have a very strong partner community. I mean, we'll talk about those groups in a little bit, but the partner community has a real influence on what you do. I know of several occasions where feedback has been given and feedback has been acted on. And I sat down with Drew last night and we just chatted. The thing I really liked about it is the open and inclusive culture that Qlik has. Unfortunately Brenda isn't here today, but I think the Qlik leadership are really open. So that's a thing that you're still keeping top of mind, all the time?
Absolutely. Yeah, we have multiple levels of feedback. You sit on some of the ambassador meetings, Luminaries is another great one. We have all these enthusiastic customers and partners, but also very vocal. We choose them that way intentionally. We want the ones that are going to speak up. We don't want ones who say, "Oh, we love Qlik, yeah I love Qlik," but never push back. We want ones who say, "Here's what I need." And what you saw today, by the way, time series. Right back. How long have you guys been telling us about that? Here it is. So we do listen to customers. Not always fun sometimes, but it works, and today you're seeing a lot of the results of that.
