When you’ve worked in business intelligence for as long as I have, you get used to vendors making big claims about their products. Some argue that their platforms provide the most granular insights. Others say they offer the best user experience, or that they can process massive data volumes with lightning speed. A few of these statements are marketing hype. But not all of them. Qlik, for example, has always claimed its products can handle large volumes of data.
Today, I want to share a client success story that proves Qlik’s claims are firmly grounded in fact. Not only did our client achieve unprecedented data analysis and forecasting outcomes, but it also used Qlik to process two billion (yes, billion) records in 24 minutes. Here’s how it happened…
The client, one of Southeast Asia’s largest telecommunications companies, collects massive amounts of data every day. There isn’t a phone call or data connection across the network that isn’t recorded. However, its spreadsheet processes for viewing and analysing records were time-consuming and prone to error. Accurately forecasting end of month results was almost impossible.
The client asked Professional Advantage to develop a solution that would make it easy for decision makers to:
- See a 15-month rolling history of the client’s networking activity, as well as other data sources such as financial profit and loss
- View information like phone call and data use trends
- Generate informative, easy-to-interpret reports that help predict future performance
- Find the insights they need without relying on manual processes
If you’re familiar with IT projects, this may sound straightforward. However, the 15-month rolling history needed to include all phone and data connection records made over that time. This meant processing huge volumes of data quickly – a challenge that not every BI platform could rise to meet.
We recommended Qlik for two reasons. The first was that the client was using Qlik products for other reporting and analysis purposes. Secondly, we knew Qlik could handle large data volumes with ease.
We made the right choice. To create the 15-month rolling history, Qlik processed two billion records in 24 minutes. For context, it took more than two days just to access and cache the historical data from the client’s data warehouse. It’s not every day that a software product not only lives up to its hype, but also blows expectations out of the water. This was a fantastic outcome for the client, Professional Advantage and Qlik!
If you’re curious to discover how your organisation can realise similar benefits, read more about what makes Qlik products QlikView and Qlik Sense great.
