This final chapter discusses scaling up to an enterprise application with information on licensing, enterprise servers, data sources, mobile applications, QlikCommunity, the QlikView reference manual, and the latest addition to the QlikView offerings: Qlik Sense.
Perhaps you are the CFO of a company, and after downloading and investigating QlikView, you have decided that this is a tool that can really benefit your company. Or maybe you are a warehouse manager, an accounting analyst, or a sales manager, and you heard about QlikView from a friend. Now that you know what QlikView can do, you have recommended it to the upper management. The question they will most probably ask you is—What will it take? How do we make QlikView available for collaborative analysis in our company? The answer is: Scale up to an enterprise application.
Enterprise applications that are used to share data among multiple people require licensing on business servers from QlikView.
Recall that the very first page when you open QlikView contains a link to the license information about the Personal Edition of QlikView. To open QlikView documents created by someone else, such as the one we created in Chapter 1, Getting That Financial Data Into QlikView, we would both need licenses. I would need a license so that the document could be saved for more than personal use, and you would need one to open a QlikView document (qvw) created by someone else.
Note
QlikView Personal Edition can only open files created using that particular copy of QlikView. This means, with QlikView Personal Edition you cannot use your QlikView documents on different computers, you cannot share your QlikView documents with another unregistered user, or open a QlikView document from another user (exempted are documents specially prepared for personal use by QlikTech). This can be found on page 25 of the QlikView reference manual.
Figure 10-1: QlikView Personal Edition License information
Licenses are available for named users or as concurrent user licenses. Each QlikView licensed user has a fully functioning version of QlikView. When evaluating the cost of business intelligence software, the actual licensing costs are usually a small part of the return-on-investment calculation. QlikView is designed to help eliminate some of those extra service costs, often necessary with other business intelligence software, by helping you become your own developer.
The current pricing is available at the QlikView website. This is a good place to start when thinking about implementing an enterprise version of the software. The pricing information also includes information on the following:
- Maintenance and support
- Extra net solutions and services to make QlikView available outside your company's intranet firewall
- QlikView expressor—the IT management tool used for auditing usage, user security, and managing metadata such as dimension and formula consistency
- Training and services
Contact the QlikView sales department when you are ready for more information. Navigate to http://www.qlik.com/us/explore/buy, or use the How to Buy link on the Qlik website.
Figure 10-2: How to Buy link on the Qlik website
QlikView is a business, not a not for profit foundation, and it needs to make its profits from somewhere. QlikView expects that you will love the product and will recommend it to your company. The pricing model for enterprise licensing is comparatively reasonable, but you must remember to factor in the initial install and setup services that come with any new enterprise-level application. For this, QlikView offers their QlikView Expert Services with the Foundation Services offering, which are available at http://www.qlikview.com/us/services/expert-services/foundation-services.
A Foundation Services engagement will cover the following aspects:
- System architecture foundation
- Data architecture foundation
- Application architecture foundation
- Solution validation
You can connect to an enterprise server via the Open in Server command in the File menu, or from the Open in Server tab on the Start page.