Industry

Data Integration, Data Quality, and Analytics

Location

United States

Size

2000+

Use Case

Virtual training

Overview

Founded in 1993, Qlik has quickly established itself as a global leader in business intelligence. Its platform remains the only one of its kind on the market, allowing anyone at any skill level to generate valuable insights from business data. The company is built on the belief that data integration and data analytics can—and should—be used to drive real, meaningful change.

Qlik is first and foremost an innovator, constantly looking for ways to expand and improve its portfolio. This means it regularly acquires companies whose products complement its own. The company also supports a thriving partner ecosystem, working with vendors around the world to help companies truly get more from their data.

Challenge

Scale up customer and partner training

One of Qlik’s primary selling points is how they allow anyone at any skill level to get value from business data. The company needed to ensure that its external training continued to reflect this, even at scale.

1. Offering personalized training at scale
   In keeping with its mission to help everyone generate insights from business data, Qlik needed to train both customers and partners in data integration and data analytics. Qlik’s existing tools could not support training at scale, particularly in cases where products were on-premises.
2. Maintaining unique training environments
   Each of Qlik’s partners has a different specialization, requiring a unique training environment. Because the company updates its products every quarter, maintaining these environments proved both challenging and time consuming.
3. Contending with rapid growth
   Originally, when Qlik rolled out a new product, it would send instructors to deliver on-premises training to its partners. The rapid expansion of Qlik’s product portfolio and partner ecosystem soon rendered this approach unsustainable.
4. Hosting large global events
   Qlik regularly hosts major conferences like QlikWorld. The workshop training sessions at these events were highly successful but since only a portion of the potential training audience are in attendance at these events it meant the most current training isn’t easily scaled to Qlik’s entire customer and partner base. Also the time and resources required for preparing and delivering sessions to participants at the events was becoming prohibitive, since there was more interest and demand for the live training than time or resources available.

“Our internal training was analytics-focused and highly technical. Not all of our customers and partners have that level of expertise. We also recognized data integration skill gaps at many of our partnered organizations.”

Adityha Pai, Qlik Solutions Architect – Partner Enablement

Solution

Qlik needed the right partner to be able to scale effectively and automate their self-paced training workflow.

“Qlik is an API-first platform, so I love the CloudShare APIs. They’ve allowed us to automate both workshop registration and operation — we no longer need to rely on someone sending an email asking for a training environment, everything happens behind the scenes.” Adityha Pai, Qlik Solutions Architect–Partner Enablement.

After assessing CloudShare and its industry-leading virtual labs, Qlik saw the solution was the perfect fit for its needs. Not only was it cloud-based and able to scale to meet any level of demand, it was also capable of automating and spinning up custom training environments for the company’s specialized products quickly and seamlessly. Plus, the APIs, over-the-shoulder functionality, custom snapshots, and self-paced training functionality were also key features for the company.

“Whenever we’ve encountered an issue or faced any challenges, CloudShare support has stepped up within a few minutes. They’ve been excellent at supporting us throughout our partnership.” Adityha Pai, Qlik Solutions Architect – Partner Enablement.

Here are some important ways that CloudShare stood out from the competition in meeting Qlik’s needs:

• Resource Savings
  Rather than spending several hours configuring each training environment, with CloudShare Qlik could spin them up in minutes, providing experiences tailored to each knowledge level.
• Scalability
  With CloudShare, Qlik could seamlessly deliver instructional training to any number of participants without impacting performance.
• BYOD Support
  By delivering training content virtually with CloudShare, the company could considerably streamline events like the Qlik World conference.
• Integration & Automation
  Qlik could leverage CloudShare’s APIs to simplify both the registration and delivery of its external training.

Results

Qlik’s customers get hands on with scalable self-paced training

Qlik’s partnership with CloudShare has not only enabled self-paced training in a variety of environments, but it’s provided the company with a scalable platform for creating hands-on training experiences.

“With over-the-shoulder, we can monitor the screens of students to see where they’re going wrong, then ping them to offer help. Without this feature, it wouldn’t be possible for our instructors to provide assistance to multiple people.” Adityha Pai, Qlik Solutions Architect – Partner Enablement.

Some of the highlights of CloudShare for Qlik include:

Quality Experiences

Although Qlik still hosts instructor-led workshops, it knows these will struggle to keep up with its rapid release schedule. The company continues to shift towards self-paced training, enabling simplified setup, more active participation, and enhanced course variety.

Flexibility

With CloudShare, Qlik can spin up new training environments from snapshots to easily support its rapid feature release cycles. Customers can also specify the training they wish to complete. These innovations save the company significant resources, simplify workshop preparations, and ensure that Qlik’s partners always work with the latest versions of its software.

Customer Satisfaction

Qlik has already seen the connection between higher levels of training for customers and the number of support tickets issued. They’ve also received extremely positive feedback from both partners and customers. The training developed through CloudShare is intuitive, helping fulfill the company’s mission of allowing anyone to generate insights from business data.

Event Support

At Qlik World 2023, the company hosted more than 200 breakout sessions with hands-on workshops. Prior to using CloudShare, this would require considerable preparation, including setting up and configuring multiple physical machines. With CloudShare, Qlik was able to support multiple sessions of 80 participants with two virtual machines.

“CloudShare has made delivering training so much simpler, especially for onboarding. It’s like a ready-made pizza — you just have to bring it home, do a few minutes of prep, and it’s good to go.”

Adityha Pai, Qlik Solutions Architect – Partner Enablement