Growing Through the Recession, And Aiming for Nasdaq

Looking at its numbers, you could think that QlikTech lives in another world, but this fast-growing business intelligence company and member of SACC-USA resides in Radnor, Pennsylvania just northwest of Philadelphia. “We hired 100 employees globally this year, and here we added about thirty,” says Lars Björk, CEO of QlikTech Inc, who like his company has his roots in Sweden, but now lives in the U.S.

“We have been affected by the recession too, but in a very, very different way compared to the general market. When others have declined, had to lay off people and seen businesses walk away, we have continued to grow. We have grown slightly slower and not hired as many as before, but we have been thriving and picking up business,” he says, adding “We are not only growing, but moving up the stack, penetrating far more large accounts. Take New York as an example. We are speaking to between 15 and 20 of the biggest institutions that are seeing the same needs as our typical mid-size customers. They want return on investments now, they don’t want to wait nine months for the return.”   

QlikTech emerged some 15 years ago from the Ideon Science Park, an incubator linked to Lund’s University in southern Sweden. The
idea behind the company was to create an easier, smarter and more flexible way to get useful information out of database systems. This used to be a job for experts, who required meticulously filled-out hierarchical questionnaires in order to start the extraction process. Many companies still deal with their information this way, but they do it at a price in terms of competitiveness. What QlikTech is selling, and what makes them keep growing when much of the global economy is scraping by on its bruised knees, is a software application called a QlikView that allows users to ask questions the way a human being thinks, by throwing out words and associations, ant then adding more words leading us to the data we want, rather than first building an elaborate and structured search string or query.

QlikView is not only responding to business user’s need for flexibility, but to what Lars Björk calls the “consumerization” of software and IT in general. “Think of how you use Google, Wikipedia and various social media. You never took a class in how to use them or read a manual, but just intuitively sat down and started to use them. Business users are however often expected to take weeklong classes to use legacy systems from Oracle or SAP. But why does it have to be so complex at work when it is that simple at home? What we have shown is that it doesn’t have to be that difficult to do it at work. A user can pick up QlikView and understand how to use it in a few minutes. This is more in line with the expectations of the next generation of business users, today’s teenagers. They don’t want to wait around for information, they want it now and wherever they are and on mobile devises like PDA’s and iPhones!”

Hence QlikTech’s 9th version of QlikView comes with a mobile app for the iPhone and other platforms. “You can analyze your information from an iPhone.” And a Google Android version is also in the pipeline.

QlikTech claims 800 partners and 12,000 customers, and the revenue for 2008 was $119 million; almost four times that of 2006. The company moved its headquarters from Sweden to the U.S. after having secured foreign venture capital in 2004. Research and Development is still based in Lund.

In an interview for the summer 2008 issue of Currents magazine, Lars Björk said that the company was preparing to go public, but then came the financial meltdown in September. It was a challenging environment for an IPO, but QlikTech kept growing and plans to file for a public offering sometime in 2010, ideally in the summer. “Nasdaq is the preferred choice, but NYSE is also an option,” Lars Björk says.

Written by Hans Sandberg