Qlik has definitely got an “ability to execute” warning from Gartner – being placed just above the line. Gartner speaks about lack of market momentum, referring to challenges when switching from QlikView to Qlik Sense. I would agree that this previously has been a challenge,  which might have inspired some Qlik-customers to look at other alternatives. Today though, the Qlik Analytics Modernization Program offers a smooth migration and also a new hybrid world – a combination of cloud and on-prem that none of the other leaders can offer.

I guess you’ve understood my view on the term “ability to execute”. I’m not really buying in to Qlik being placed lower than Tableau and Microsoft. Just as well as pointing out Qlik’s licensing trauma you could point at Tableau’s performance problems or Microsoft’s lack of on-prem/hybrid functionality and they could be on par.

In most large Qlik installations the data is sourced via a data warehouse, so the fact that you always use a data warehouse and automatically get access to machine learning capacity with Microsoft and Tableau shouldn’t really imply a higher ability to execute rating.  

Finally – look at the journey of Tableau and Microsoft. They started out as super executors, lost it and then made a comeback. Perhaps Qlik will do the same now – given that all licensing and pricing obstacles are being removed

Gartner declares visualizations as commodity and focuses on augmented (many times by) AI analytics. It’s good that Gartner is future oriented, but I would say that the greater part of the current installation by the leaders focus on the core of traditional BI such as, showing a single version of the truth, KPI reporting and in some cases enabling collaborative analytics and self-service.

One could say that Qlik created the modern BI market back in 2007–2009 and entered the leader’s Quadrant in 2010. This was done many times by bypassing the heavy, stringent data integration structures and using Qlik’s ETL power giving the business access to analytical apps they never had had before – faster and possible to change and adapt in an agile way. Qlik’s current vision is to bring this agility into the data integration layer using QDI and cloud databases. Given the fact that Qlik has a strong hybrid offering together with the active intelligence vision and all the augmented analytics that already are in place – Qlik has good potential to be become the leader with the best vision.