Although times are tough, we still have some success stories in the software industry. QlikTech recently announced 50 percent revenue growth from 2007 to 2008 to reach $120 million in revenue. The company now has 10,585 customers in 92 countries, and approximately 500,000 users of its QlikView business intelligence product.

So how does one company manage to grow in an era when many are struggling not to shrink? On a recent visit, QlikTech CEO Lars Bjork, who came to the company as CFO and COO in 2000 when there were six customers and revenue was at $2 million, described some of the reasons.

Founded in 1993 in Sweden, QlikTech is an extremely focused company, concentrated on its one market of data analysis. One of the keys to its product is that it loads into memory so it is extremely fast. Also the software was designed with the idea that users will want to do with data what cannot be predicted, so it should not be canned. The analysis capability should be extremely flexible and able to access data wherever it is. Moreover, QlikView can scale with processors so it becomes faster as more processors are added. It installs quickly: most deployments are up and running in two weeks, when competitors may take months to deploy and often with the added expense of professional services.

The software is sold with a guarantee; no one has ever asked for money back. The sales cycle is four to eight weeks; customers are offered a free trial. The sales strategy is to sell into large companies at the "grass roots" level, winning acceptance in small projects and letting the word spread through the business users of the organization. The other sales strategy is to partner with software companies that embed the product into their own, to offer the data analysis capability to their own customers.

These characteristics, especially the rapid return on investment, put the company in a strong position in a down economy. "It's working," says Bjork. "We continue to grow in an overall market that is not growing." And that is coming at the expense of the established market leaders including: Cognos, acquired by IBM; Hyperion, acquired by Oracle; Business Objects, acquired by SAP; and also Microsoft, Actuate, Information Builders, Infor, and Corda Technologies.

"Time to value is the key to decisions today for most users and decision-making," Bjork says. "And that's going to stay true after the recession."

To help our readers in IT and business management get the job done, we will be keeping our ears to the ground for other stories of software companies delivering on this time-to-value theme, which is likely to be sounded for months to come.

Regards,

John P. Desmond
Editor
jdesmond@softwaremag.com

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