The struggle in West Africa and worldwide to contain Ebola has led to numerous calls from doctors to aid organisations for better use of technology to curb the spread of the virus – whether it is the development of new ways to test for the disease, early-warning systems or methods of communication for frontline healthcare workers. We’ve become so used to technology providing an answer in all aspects of life, that it only makes sense to turn to it when faced with a crisis.

Indeed, developments in emerging technologies do have a big part to play in the fight against pandemics and disease. A recent example is how satellite data is being used by researchers to track wind storms and their connection with valley fever and meningitis, two airborne diseases that are transmitted more easily in dusty environments. As in this instance, while most technologies will not provide an out and out cure, they can go a long way to enhancing early detection or indeed, preventing the spread of the disease.

Let’s take big data analytics to start with. While both the healthcare industry and the private sector have been advocates of this technology for some time, it’s potential to benefit aid organisations on the ground has remained largely unexplored. Fortunately, things are beginning to change; since the latest outbreak of Ebola in March, many experts have come to the realisation that big data can provide crucial insights which can be used to help fight infectious diseases.

Hundreds of relevant data sources exist – there’s social media data, data on people’s movements in and out of sea and air terminals and information about the disease itself. The biggest hurdle is pulling multiple and unstructured data streams from different sources into a format that can be easily analysed, and, importantly, one that allows us to understand how the disease has spread.

When disasters or pandemics hit, having the ability to make informed and data-driven decisions, such as where to deploy rapid response teams or community programmes, is critical. When visualised in the right way, data has the potential to isolate previously unexpected trends, pinpoint vital information gaps and, ultimately, become an indispensable tool in a health worker’s armoury.

In the case of Ebola, what has been achieved so far with big data? At Qlik, we’ve created an application that aggregates publically available data on infection levels and mortality rates. This has given us the ability to visualise the patterns around the number of mortalities in each region compared to the number of people infected, and also the trend of the spread. By adding in data on medical intervention we would also be able to track the effectiveness of different preventive measures and the extent to which each approach has curbed contagion levels.

Another valuable data set is generated by the use of technology itself – mobile phone data or call-data records (CDR), which contain information about when calls are made and received, and roughly where the device is located. While this information doesn’t tell you exactly who is infected, it does show patterns of conversation and tracks movement. Most notably, CDR data has been used by researchers to monitor the spread of malaria in Kenya and to ascertain which areas were most likely to be hit next by the disease.

This type of data, in particular, can help aid and health organisations determine where and how best to respond. After all, one of the greatest challenges in the event of any epidemic – whether it is Ebola or winter flu – is distributing the right medical resource and intervention where needed to contain the spread. What this data should be able to do, is ensure that resources are allocated quickly, in right place and at the right time to administer the correct care, rather than a stab in the dark approach. Not only would it save lives, but it would also mean that health experts and aid volunteers are being used as effectively as possible.

Tracking the outbreak isn’t the only way we can use technology to curb a spread. Other technologies that we’ve deployed in a business environment can also help. Take technologies that enable flexible working for example.

If you can set staff up with the ability to securely access company information and do their jobs remotely then they can still work as effectively away from the office as they can onsite. That means that, if a member of staff contracts a virus, rather than having to go in and potentially spread it to a co-worker, they can continue to work from home. Or in a more extreme situation, if the office becomes a contagion-zone, then staff can avoid the area completely, but still do their jobs wherever they are.

When harnessed in the right way, technology such as big data analytics can help governments and health organisations intervene effectively when a viral outbreak hits. If we work together, share data sets and continue to use these innovations to tackle our approach to wider societal issues, then we put ourselves in good stead to contain and maybe one day even stop the spread of diseases in their entirety.

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Sean Farrington has been MD UK & Ireland and Regional Vice President for Northern Europe for Qlik since July 2009. Prior to Qlik, he was Regional Vice President and General Manager, UK, Ireland and South Africa for SAP Business Objects. During his tenure, he doubled the company’s revenue to approximately €30M per annum. Sean has over 19 years’ experience in the business software industry, 15 of those are within Business intelligence.

(Image credit: Ebola virus, via NIAID)

Qlik, the business intelligence & visualization solutions provider has been selected by the frozen ready-meals manufacturer and retailer COOK, to help glean customer buying trends, inventory, and margins through this festive season.

Jeff Turner, head of IT for COOK explained, “As all of the products we sell are prepared by hand in our kitchen, it’s vital that we’re able to effectively manage our stock. QlikView has provided us with the ability to make incredibly timely decisions about production during one of our key trading periods. It has been a massive leap for the company and we can see no shortage of opportunities for the future.”

Qlik in alliance with partner Informance have developed the QlikView Christmas Stock Tracker App, which will let COOK’s food, production, and retail teams gain “timely and relevant” insight information about inventory and stock, further enabling them to better anticipate demand and advise production teams.

Sean Farrington, RVP Northern Europe & MD UK & Ireland at Qlik, further notes, “We’re delighted to see that the platform is giving multiple teams at COOK access to data and allowing them to make strategic stock decisions in a timely fashion.”

“QlikView was designed on the premise that data is for eveyone, not just the IT department, so we’re thrilled that COOK has been able to benefit from this approach during the busy festive period,” he said.

A news release announcing the situation also noted that COOK intends to expand QlikView usage across their enterprise with the introduction of a number of manufacturing-specific QlikView dashboards that will be implemented to support COOK’s long-term IT strategy.

(Image credit: Wendell)

Press Release: Qlik, a leader in data discovery, today introduced general availability of Qlik Sense, the first device-independent, self-service visualization and discovery product engineered for enterprise-class governance and performance. Built on a modern architecture and powered by the patented, industry-proven Qlik data indexing engine, Qlik Sense gives users the unrestricted ability to create personalized data analyses and explore the relationships that exist in data to reveal connections instantly. Qlik Sense is designed to serve audiences equally without compromise: business users gain the intuitive experience they need, developers gain boundless possibilities for what they can create and IT gains centralized control for management and governance.

Just as Qlik disrupted the business intelligence (BI) industry to pioneer the data discovery category, the company is now leading the next transformation as the category matures to governed, user-driven creation with the launch of Qlik Sense. According to Gartner, Inc.’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform report, “By 2015, enterprise buyers of BI platforms will predominantly purchase platforms that support both strong and broad business-user-accessible data discovery capabilities and IT-driven enterprise features for data reuse, governance, security and scalability.”

“Our vision for Qlik Sense builds on our belief that anyone in an organization should be able to easily create dynamic dashboards to explore their data to uncover meaningful insights,” said Lars Björk, Qlik CEO. “When we set out to create Qlik Sense, we envisioned a world where every knowledge worker, from any device, could rapidly create visually rich analytics to explore theories, prove hypothesis, or discover new trends that can change the trajectory of their business.”

“We have been very impressed with Qlik Sense so far. For us, simplicity of delivery is key, and it allows us to accelerate the delivery of actionable analytics to the right people at the right time,” said Perry Willis, Head of Information Technology EMEA at Colliers International. “Although we have strong QlikView skills in the IT team, so creation of applications is easy, Qlik Sense allows even greater creation flexibility so we can do more, faster. The synergy we are rapidly developing by using both QlikView and Qlik Sense is helping us provide our Real Estate advisors across 40 countries in EMEA smarter analytics solutions.”

Qlik Sense is the first offering to deliver self-service BI based on a server-side development and distribution model. Whereas most products require separate developer licenses and leverage the traditional approach of develop and publish, Qlik Sense empowers every user with the full capability to create, customize, or extend visualizations from any device, at any point in time.

“The problem with self-service BI has always been that you either get rich BI capability with weak usability, or a very approachable product with limited analysis capability,” said Anthony Deighton, Qlik CTO and Senior Vice President of Products. “With Qlik Sense, we set out to change that. That’s why we built Qlik Sense on the second generation of our patented associative data indexing engine, but gave it a rich, modern visualization front-end that is intuitive, yet powerful.”

Smart Search and Smart Visualizations Accelerate Time to Insight
Qlik Sense lets users create apps through a drag-and-drop experience that delivers relevant analysis, interactive reports, and dashboards critical to decision-making and operations. Users can freely explore their intuition since they are not limited to predefined paths they must follow or questions they must formulate ahead of time. The Qlik associative data indexing engine allows users to easily expose relationships among data dimensions, uncovering insights that would have been hidden in traditional hierarchical, query-based data models. This provides users with the freedom to explore data at any point in their analysis.

Smart Search allows a user to simply type words or numbers to begin analysis of a data set. When a user types in a search string, Smart Search connects the dots, uncovering data relationships and information in locations that might otherwise be unnoticed. In addition, intuitive Smart Visualizations uncover all the relationships between data dimensions, revealing insights that would have been hidden in traditional data models. These cues help users explore patterns by dynamically updating and highlighting new information and associations.

Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration Enables Broader Knowledge Sharing
Qlik Sense puts the social and collaborative experience front and center. Workgroups and teams can collaborate by collectively sharing analyses anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Its touch-driven interface and responsive design automatically adapts visualizations for the best possible experience on any device.

Data Storytelling allows multiple users, on any device to share their insights at a point in time in presentation format. Users can add commentary and narrative and drill down directly from the presentation to Qlik Sense to answer questions on the fly. This helps to drive communication of insight and facilitates group discovery.

Enterprise-Class Governance and Security Provides Centralized Control
With Qlik Sense, users can build their own visualizations from a centralized library of pre-built data sets, expressions, and visualizations to ensure consistent use of data and values. Its modern architecture allows new capabilities for governance and manageability to support workgroup and distributed enterprise environments, including license allocation and usage monitoring in an easy-to-use interface that saves time and simplifies troubleshooting. It also enables IT to implement enterprise-level security requirements with a flexible security-rules engine that offers granular control for progressive development with powerful audit and logging.

In addition, Qlik Sense supports robust data integration to transform and combine multiple, disparate data sources and provide seamless analysis across them, including fast calculations, associative exploration, and search. Its open and powerful APIs give developers the ability to embed Qlik Sense into web pages and custom applications, and extend core capabilities to meet custom needs.

Availability and Pricing
Qlik Sense is available today. The Company has also introduced a new, more flexible token-based licensing model for Qlik Sense to provide greater flexibility for license management. Qlik Sense tokens can be allocated to named users, or leveraged across multiple login sessions for one or more users. With the token-based licensing model, customers can deploy multiple servers, across multiple geographies, to optimize for performance and availability without paying any additional costs. For more pricing information, contact Qlik or one of its registered partners.

In addition to offering the complete Qlik Sense offering for interactive visualization, Qlik will continue to offer its market-proven platform, QlikView®, to provide application development that enables analysts with minimal development expertise to build and publish powerful analytical applications. Qlik Sense Desktop, will also continue to be available as a free download.

(Image Credit: Qlik)

The explosion of data in recent years has resulted in huge demand for not only storage and processing solutions, but also techniques and tools to make sense of this data. The emergence of visualization tools – interactive dashboards, bar graphs, animations – to effectively analyse the information coming from inside and outside of organisations, has meant that business intelligence (BI) is becoming jointly governed by IT and business users themselves.

Companies like Tableau, Birst, Jaspersoft and SiSense (to name just a few) are targeting enterprise customers with the promise of data accessibility across the whole organisation – from novice C-level executives to seasoned IT professionals.

Among these companies, Qlik announced yesterday it is preparing to offer a free version of its Qlik Sense Desktop with no restrictions on either personal or commercial use. The new service will give customers a drag-and-drop user experience for data visualization, exploration, and storytelling capabilities. Users will be able to take data from a variety of sources, from Excel spreadsheets to ODBC databases, and examine the resulting data dynamically with dashboard views.

Commenting on the news yesterday, Qlik’s CTO and Senior Vice President of Products said,

“Qlik Sense Desktop is a great way to show people who are new to Qlik the power and control you can feel by exploring your own data to make it meaningful, visual, and even fun. Our continued commitment to simplicity and ease of use to put users in control is delivering on the promise of true self-service BI,”

The announcement of Qlik’s free service is an interesting move by the software company. While Tableau and other BI vendors also offer free trials, they are usually time-limited. Qlikviews, on the other hand, is offered for “free in toto.” The full Qlik Sense Desktop product will be generally available in September 2014.

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(Image Credit: Iouri Goussev)