Qlik Sense provides tempting prices and contract terms with group offering
- Summary:
- Qlik Sense Cloud Business Platform comes to market with a fresh approach to pricing and contract commitment along with a facelift to its adoption programs. Here's what it means.
Data visualization vendor Qlik has announced the general availability of the Qlik Sense Cloud Business Platform. This is aimed at SMBs and is attractively priced at $25 per user per month with no annual contract commitment.
Prior to the announcement, I took a briefing from Drew Clarke, Vice President of Products, Qlik Cloud. My agenda was to better understand the pricing model, get a sense of the onboarding plan and get a feel of how Qlik plans to make this a top of mind choice.
Qlik Sense pricing model
First pricing. Along with fellow analysts like Laurie McCabe, I find that SMBs are incredibly price sensitive. It is hard for SMBs to equate cost and value unless it is blindingly obvious. How does Qlik solve for this?
Qlik already has free and single user ($20/month) pricing, both of which use the cloud version of Qlik Sense. The new offering is aimed at small, geographically distributed groups. Typically, these might be 10-25 users although Qlik claims it has deployments of 300 plus users per organization in this configuration.
Today, Qlik is not offering price breaks as customer add users although Clarke said there comes a point where customers are encouraged to switch to annual pricing. This has the effect of dropping the per user price. Each deal will be individually negotiated but the idea behind the current offering is to let customers ease into using Qlik Sense in group environments such that customers can work out adoption and usage patterns over time. Think of it as a laid back 'land and expand' approach.
Clarke says the model has been extensively tested with early adopters, noting that Qlik has more than 100,000 registered subscribers. I like this idea. It is the best compromise you're likely to see for a product that takes time to understand and for which use cases develop over months and sometimes years.
Qlik Sense onboarding
For onboarding, Clarke said that Qlik is building a portfolio of assets including instructional videos that guide users into how best to elect scenarios, managing governance topics. selecting appropriate visualizations work, how to connect data sources and the like.
We've invested in cloud success reps. Those individuals are trained to answer questions that are typical of the SMB. We believe the human to human contact is vital in a solution of this type.
We’ve also invested in a lot of videos to help quickstart customers. As we watch how people are using the product we will introduce and improve the user experience so that customers get fast insight into the metrics they want.
Qlik Sense marketing
Finally, we talked about marketing. I view Qlik Sense as a technically superior product to its main rival Tableau but find that Qlik is not as strong on the marketing front. If anything, it tends to hang back, relying on its technical chops to speak for the product. That doesn't work in todays market and certainly not among SMBs who may be fed up of preparing VLOOKUPs but need assurance that what they will get makes a positive difference. Clarke's answer was intriguing:
In my opinion and looking at the marketing plans with the cloud - we have to be more sophisticated in reaching the knowledge workers. But you know that since acquisition, the entire team is still here. I think you'll see Rick (Jackson, CMO) doing some interesting outreach content with the social side of the house.
Qlik has an ecosystem of 1,700 partners. Around 50% of the business comes through this channel but today, Qlik wants to maintain control over the sales and marketing of this offering, while offloading some of the onboarding to the channel. Clarke says that channel partners want departmental adoption in as frictionless a manner as possible. That fits with the general narrative Clarke outlined.
My take
In the last few months I have heard plenty about how time to value is playing into decisions and what that means for pricing and contract commitments. SMBs in particular are loathe to make, what for them, will be significant long term commitments without proving value first. Qlik is addressing that issue in a practical and fair fashion.
While data viz adoption ought to be a no brainer, it is a fact of life that getting to grips with these styles of solution is non trivial, even for seasoned spreadsheet users. The more Qlik can put towards easing that transition, the more chance it stands of making those 'land and expand' deals a reality.
Add in a degree of uncertainty in the US markets following the Trump election and it is easy to see why Qlik is operating this model.
Qlik will need to be aggressive on the marketing front but reading between the lines of Clarke's statements, it appears the company has proven its ability to execute to its private equity masters, and so can look forward to lassoing enough marketing spend to make a decent splash.