Qlik Acquires NodeGraph To Enhance End-to-End Analytics With and Drive ‘Explainable BI’

Qlik announced the acquisition of NodeGraph, a customizable metadata management solution, to help expand its analytics data pipeline capabilities with interactive data lineage, impact analysis and governance and drive “explainable BI,” a higher level of visibility and trust in data. Acquiring NodeGraph advances Qlik’s vision of Active Intelligence, where technology and processes trigger immediate action from real-time, up-to-date and trusted data to accelerate business value across the entire data and analytics supply chain.

“As enterprises activate data and increase its use for real-time decision-making, it’s crucial that data be timely, trustworthy and consistent across the entire organization,” said Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik. “NodeGraph’s interactive data lineage, impact analysis and governance capabilities make it crystal clear where data is coming from, how it was transformed and how trustworthy it is. This visibility provides every employee with confidence and trust in data, which is essential in creating a culture driven by Active Intelligence where data becomes part of every task.”

Organizations are empowering more and more employees with data and analytics to fuel better and more timely decisions. As data from various sources spreads throughout the organization, both IT and business leaders need to collaborate and continually ensure that data is trustworthy and being used in a consistent and correct way by everyone.

Per Gartner®, “Customers are looking for better solutions for displaying end-to-end lineage across multiple sources. The out-of-the-box lineage functionality is often limited to a table view within a single source, so it’s not very useful. Customers are also concerned with limited reporting on data lineage results. There is very limited autogenerated lineage from ETL solutions, and the products are, according to a customer, “Still not up to speed with data lineage end-to-end visualization and impact analysis.” – “Accelerate Adoption of Enterprise Metadata Management Solutions by Improving Usability for the Business” by Alan Dayley, Mark Beyer, Ehtisham Zaidi, Guido De Simoni, Gartner, 13 April 2020.

NodeGraph’s lineage and governance capabilities will expand Qlik’s ability to provide the data fabric that customers need to fully understand the data flowing through their analytics data pipelines – from source through transformation to use. NodeGraph’s unique field level lineage on specific data elements and their transformations helps identify “gold-standard” calculations and shows exactly where important metrics and KPIs come from, driving the notion of “explainable BI” across multiple versions of the truth.

The open design of NodeGraph enables connectivity and lineage across a wide ecosystem of cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, along with an entire range of analytics sources such as Qlik, SSIS, Snowflake, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau, which perfectly matches Qlik’s agnostic approach to data integration. The depth and breadth of understanding that’s possible with NodeGraph will help organizations confidently expand data and analytics access and modernize and migrate analytics to the cloud.

“NodeGraph enables us to understand data lineage within our Qlik universe more efficiently and more completely, and consequently allows us to deliver value to the business with increased efficiency and confidence,” Lauren Coulombe, BI Developer at Ocean State Job Lot.

When deployed as part of Qlik’s cloud platform, NodeGraph will further expand Qlik’s existing SaaS roadmap and bring new capabilities to Qlik’s catalog, including impact analysis, field level lineage, and personalized consumer user experience in areas of collaboration, cognitive, search, and relevancy scores on content leveraging data “popularity.” NodeGraph will also support Qlik’s hybrid data delivery strategy with lineage to enrich regulatory compliance requirements.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Qlik is fully committed to supporting all existing NodeGraph customers and partners, many of whom are shared by Qlik. Qlik will integrate NodeGraph into its SaaS solution in the second half of 2021, with commercial monetization beginning in Q4 2021.

*GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.