Now we know where Tableau is heading. Where is Qlik going?

During the recent conference Tableau has unveiled its three-year roadmap. Briefly, it includes:

• High-performance in-memory engine based on Hyper (in the timeframe that I predicted earlier)
• Enhanced data preparation capabilities (Project Maestro)
• Built-in data governance
• Pro-active automatically designed visualizations
• Tableau Server for Linux

The most interesting are the first two. Once implemented, they will significantly reduce the gap with Qlik in terms of performance and versatility. I wouldn't expect the first version of Tabeau's in-memory engine to be as performant and scalable as Qlik's QIX (let's not dismiss almost 20 years of tuning and optimizations), however I would predict that for small and medium deployments performance will not be an issue. Even if we assume that QIX would still be 2-3 times faster than Tableau Hyper -- performance won't be a decision-critical factor anymore.

Project Maestro is another inevitable move from Tableau people who now realize that self-service data analysis requires self-service data transformation. Tableau is still reluctant building a fully-featured ETL for business users like EasyMorph, however once Project Maestro is implemented the advantage of having built-in ETL capabilities in Qlik would be diminished (but not dismissed).

Now, when Tableau has clear advantage on the data visualization side and stops being a fancy add-on to databases but becomes more and more a self-contained analytical platform, the question is -- where is Qlik going?

QlikView is not actively developed anymore. All the recent developments on the Qlik Sense side in 90% cases are focused on expanding API capabilities, while its data visualization capabilities remain frugal. Honestly, I don't understand this development logic. I would understand it, if Qlik's product strategy assumed heavy reliance on 3rd party tools for decent data visualization and analysis. However so far I struggle to see any high-quality 3rd party tools built on top of Qlik Sense API that can amend the built-in visualizations. Qlik Market might have a few interesting extensions, but they're typically very specialized. Qlik Branch lacks high-quality extensions and is full of no longer supported experimental projects. Qlik itself doesn't promote any 3rd party tools and its product roadmap is yet to be seen.

So where is Qlik going?