ARTICLES
ARTICLES
Building a Sense of Community
- an interview with Donald Farmer, Vice President Innovation and Design at Qlik
Named as one of America’s fastest growing technology companies by Forbes, alongside Apple and LinkedIn, Qlik is still
very much a corporation embracing its Swedish heritage and
culture. Founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden, as a small consulting project to analyze multi-dimensional data, Qlik has
grown to become the world’s largest business intelligence
vendor.
The company whose global headquarters is in the Philadelphia suburb of Radnor, Penn., has nearly 2000 employees
Donald Farmer, VP Innovation and Design
and has a global partner network that supports more than
30,000 customers in over 100 countries. The company’s
core focus is to help its users to transform raw data to refined information to analysis and conclusions resulting in relevant action. Qlik’s software platform, QlikView, combines enterprise-class analytics and search
functionality. And its popularity is undeniable as the customers range from middle market customers to
large enterprises to include Swedbank, Campbell Soup Company, Colonial Life, The Dannon Company, ING,
Kraft Foods, and Nasdaq OMX.
The customer-oriented mindset has undoubtedly been one of the major ingredients for the success and has
now resulted in the corporation’s first ever global customer event, the Qlik World Conference, held November 17-20 in Orlando, Florida. Featuring Keynote speakers such Mark Cuban – internet pioneer and owner of
the Dallas Mavericks, Adam Savage from the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters, and the CEO himself, Lars
Björk.
SACC-Philadelphia met up with another keynote speaker, Donald Farmer - Vice President of Innovation &
Design, to discuss the event in more detail.
Q: Tell us about Qlik World Conference.
A: Previously we have had quite small, local events that have been good for building awareness and for
educational purposes. But these days we have a need to address all of our customers, a wider range of our
customers and in particular what we call the enterprise customers, that is customers from large companies.
They often need more information and more content than we can give in a small local conference. So we are
actually providing a four day event in Orlando and people will be coming from all over the US and probably
from all over the world to that event. They will get four days of great content with not only good speakers
from within our company, but also from outside the company. The idea of the event is to make it not only an
educational and sales event, but also making it a real community event for the users.
Q: What makes this event different from other customer related events in the Business Intelligence industry?
A: One of the things we do that is different from the other companies in the industry is that we are extremely
open and extremely collaborative. And I actually think that comes from our Swedish background, our Swedish culture. We often describe ourselves as an American company with a Swedish Soul. We like to be just
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really straightforward and the way in which that surfaces
itself is that we will put a lot more emphasis on mutualWe often describe ourselves as
discussion. Our customers will be just as likely to meet
an American corporation with
our CEO in the corridor or the coffee line as they will see
him on stage during a keynote. It will be just as likely to
a Swedish soul
see any of team, whether they are developers or CFO and
be able to ask them any question. We manage the events content carefully, but we don’t police the event. It is not about getting just the right message out to the customer
in a very kind of pre-packaged form. It really is about building a sense of a community where everyone is open
to interact with anyone else. It is not a one-way conversation of us telling our customers things; it’s very much
a two-way experience for our customers. They get to ask us, tell us and interact with anyone in our company.
Q: What are the primary goals of arranging this event?
A: The big goal for us is to enable customers to get a comprehensive understanding of what the company
is doing, our software, our direction and our vision of the future. But also to learn from each other about
how people are solving problems with our software today. The local events by their nature can’t give you that
complete overview of what is happening and a complete picture of what we are doing in the future. By rolling
together an event over many days you can