Choosing InetSoft Style Intelligence Over QlikView-QlikTech

Differentiating Features

Enterprise Data Mashup - QlikView requires an ETL and database approach. InetSoft’s Style Intelligence is built upon an enterprise data mashup platform.  Enterprise data mashup refers to the ability to pull source data from any location and in almost any format and mash it up on the fly for dynamic information requests. The result is a structured virtual data model that consists of reusable data blocks that can be queried in real-time for presentation in Style Intelligence dashboards and reports, or used by 3rd party applications.

Data Connectivity - QlikView has out-of-the-box connection capabilities for data sources that adhere to ODBC and XML standards, as well as Excel.  InetSoft is able to connect to all of the aforementioned data sources and also supports JDBC, MOLAP (XMLA), POJO, text, Web Services (SOAP), and SAP.  Additionally, InetSoft’s data modeling features provide a toolkit for visually building data models and data queries to extract information from diverse data sources.

Open Standards - QlikView is Windows centric and can only be run on Microsoft Windows operating systems.  InetSoft utilizes open industry standards across its entire architecture deployments and can be run on any J2EE-compliant operating system, e.g. Windows (NT, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10), Linux, Solaris, HP Unix, or Mac OS running JVM 1.6 or higher.  Since InetSoft is able to work within your existing infrastructure, upfront costs are contained. 

Security Authorization & Authentication - QlikView relies on MS Active Directory and NTLM for security providers. InetSoft seamlessly integrates with all security authorization and authentication products.  It also provides a default security provider to handle authentication, creation of users/groups/roles, and the storage of component permissions.

Database Writeback - InetSoft supports data input and database write-back capabilities - also known as full-lifecycle BI – enabling end-users to interact with dashboards/reports - by entering quotes, approving requests, adjusting forecasts, adding comments, uploading photos, scanning products, and more. QlikView has no data input and database write-back capabilities.

Enterprise Scalability - Thanks to its framework-based architecture InetSoft is massively scalable and equally as powerful within very small (5 users) to very large (1000’s of users) environments where data is multi-formatted, queried from different locations, or new data sources are regularly added. QlikView is powerful in small silo’d environments where the data is nicely structured in one location.

Server Functions - Since InetSoft operates in a zero-client web browser environment InetSoft’s server assumes the server-side responsibility for all InetSoft features including data mashup design, dashboard/report design and dashboard/report usage. It can also be clustered as required. QlikView’s server is designed solely for dashboard usage and all other functions need to be performed via a Windows desktop tool.

Mapping Capabilities - InetSoft has advanced mapping capabilities that allow interactive dashboards to display continuous measures such as population or sales volume by using color ranges across any geographically defined

 

boundary on the local, state and national levels, and even custom-defined areas such as sales regions or political districts. QlikView has no built-in mapping capabilities.

Scheduling & Alerting - InetSoft features a state-of-the-art scheduling and alerting framework that goes beyond traditional business intelligence in order to provide common scheduled actions and alerting to end users via dashboards, SMS, e-mail or any other alerting mechanism when predefined thresholds are breached. QlikView has no in-built scheduling or alerting features.

Semantic Layer - QlikView offers limited metadata management. The absence of this layer requires organizations to invest additional resources into metadata management to create definitions, calculations, and dimensions for cross-functional analysis.  InetSoft provides out-of-the-box data modeling capabilities that allow you to expose business data to report designers and end users in a way that facilitates access to data and is easy for them to understand and use.