With hybrid cloud infrastructures becoming a popular option for organizations, a growing amount of data is being generated simultaneously from disparate locations: either on-premises or in the cloud.
Snowflake Inc. and QlikTech International AB partnered to provide a savvy data analytics platform to help customers leverage data from existing systems, such as SAP Data Services.
“Qlik Data Integration helps to automate the data pipelines to deliver data to where they want to use them in real time and make the data ready for analytics,” said Itamar Ankorion (pictured, right), senior vice president of technology alliances at Qlik. “Qlik Data Analytics is a robust platform for analytics and business intelligence that’s been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for over 11 years. Both of these come together into what we call Qlik Cloud, which is our SaaS-based platform.”
Ankorion and Peter MacDonald (pictured, left), vice president of cloud partnerships and business development at Snowflake, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at the recent AWS re:Invent conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the Qlik and Snowflake joint project that has resulted in an enterprise data analytics suite. (* Disclosure below.)
Accelerating the time to value for enterprises
Snowflake has made no bones about its commitment to staying the course and being a data platform first. However, several customer pain points arose, such as expensive on-premises hardware, capacity constraints and limited functionality, according to MacDonald. In addressing these issues, the company has formed a partnership with Qlik, alongside other long-standing ecosystem partners, including Amazon Web Services Inc.
“Our customers want to convert data into insights along with advanced analytics platforms in AI,” MacDonald said. “That is how they make holistic data-driven solutions that will give them a competitive advantage. With Snowflake, our approach is to focus on customer solutions that leverage data from existing systems, such as SAP, whether in the cloud or on-premise. And to do this, we leverage partners like Qlik to help customers transform their businesses.”
A set of four unique considerations had to be thought through to create the solution, according to Ankorion. The first focuses on data delivery and integrating it properly into Snowflake. The second is making that data analytics-ready once it arrives in Snowflake.
“The third element is bringing together data visualization analytics that can also take all the data now that in organizing inside Snowflake, bring other data in, bring machine learning from SageMaker, and then create a seamless integration to bring analytic applications to life,” Ankorion stated. “And the last point is we actually took the next step with this and we created something we refer to as solution accelerators.”
The partnership between both companies is already evolving and expanding in scope as Qlik, in mid-2022, announced two key features to be added to its Cloud Analytics Services for Snowflake. The first is Direct Query, enabling users to generate pushdown SQL to query Snowflake from within Qlik Sense. The second focuses on cloud data integration services and includes real-time change data capture and movement to Snowflake.
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:
(* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)