Tech Insights: Interview with Sharryn Millican, QlikTech

In our new Tech Insight series, we speak with industry leaders to get their views of what the year ahead holds for the IT world. Today we speak with Sharryn Millican, QlikTech’s vice president and regional director for Australia and New zealand.

What do you see as the single biggest challenge facing the ICT industry in the year ahead, and why?

Around the world we are seeing organisations grapple with information overload. While busily collecting terabytes of data, they struggle to use this deluge in real time to make informed decisions. After all, without a way to show correlations, trends and outliers, it’s hard to truly understand all the sheer volume of information that organisations are generating, let alone turn it into actionable insights. Consequently, organisations without the right data analytics and business intelligence (BI) solutions in place will continue to struggle in the year ahead to reap true business benefits and ROI.

What do you see as the two or three biggest growth opportunities for your customers in 2015, and why?

One of the biggest growth opportunities for businesses will be leveraging the power of BI and analytic tools. BI solutions unravel the terabytes of data that organisations are producing and present it in a relevant and contextual manner, enabling users to make quicker and better business decisions. Through the use of visualisation, organisations can see trends and correlations that they wouldn’t typically see with traditional reports and graphs.

In addition, we see an opportunity for self-service business intelligence solutions to take off. Instead of BI tools being reserved for senior members of the team, increased availability of affordable and user-friendly self-service solutions will enable everyone within the organisation to access and take advantage of BI tools to support their roles or areas of business.

What new and innovative technologies do you see emerging in your IT solution categories in 2015, and how will they help your customers?

In 2015, we will continue to develop innovative technologies with the fundamental goal of enabling every knowledge worker to rapidly create visually rich analytics from any device to explore theories, prove hypotheses or discover new trends that can change the trajectory of business.

Working together with our partners, we will be in an excellent position to offer solutions that offer simple data integration, associative technology and powerful visualisations, and Direct Discovery. This will enable businesses to augment in-memory data with more detailed data stored in the Big Data system. The outcome will be that even non-technical users will be empowered to explore data - big or small, freely, with just a few clicks.

What are your customers demanding of you more today than five years ago, and how will you meet these requirements in 2015?

Today’s data-centric economy has enticed organisations to look for easy-to-use solutions that allow the wider business to derive value from their data. At the same time, customers want the ability to manage this environment, making sure that the right people have access to the right types of data, and ultimately have control of when and where people access it.

Qlik will continue to connect customers to data by combining two forces of IT - governance and flexibility. Increasingly, the IT department will have control and governance over the environment, while users have the freedom and flexibility to work on any application of their choice.

Sharryn Millican is the Vice President & Regional Director for QlikTech, Australia & New Zealand. She is responsible for driving sustained growth and sales for QlikTech and its QlikView Business Discovery platform in addition to providing strategic direction for the company across the ANZ region. Millican has over 15 years’ experience in the IT industry and has held senior positions at several global companies.