This was my first visit to the Qonnections, thanks to the Tahola team for arranging the trip and inviting me to join. Being a fairly frequent tech show goer, I thought I knew what to expect and what I will see there. But boy, was I in for a surprise, Qlik team went an extra mile (or 10) to make the event truly special. There were big announcements (Attunity, Qlik Insight Bot, Qlik Data Catalyst), there were big demonstrations on ABDI, Conversational Analytics by non other than Elif Tutuk (@elif_tutuk), there were plenty of talks from various Qlik industry experts and to top it all, an appreciation party at Dallas Cowboys world headquarters – “The Star in Frisco“. There were something for everyone – hands on workshops for Qlik tech enthusiasts, presentations and demos for all (techies or non techies alike) and most of all, games, competition/hackathon for the not so faint-hearted seasoned developers. This also provided a great opportunity to meet and swap ideas with industry experts, specially with Qlik Branch gurus and Qlik Luminaries.
There’s been plenty of materials covering the top takeaways from Qonnections this year. I don’t want to repeat that, instead, I want to talk about the top takeaways from a architecture/developer point of view.
Top Architectural takeaway
SaaS and Multi-Cloud deployment of Qlik Sense Enterprise, this really is the direction where the market is heading and seeing Qlik leading in this is an assurance that they are here to stay as the market leader in this field. Idea of extending on premise deployment to the cloud and scale out is really refreshing. This deals with data sensitivity issues that lot of enterprises worry about and give them an option to deal with that.
On the subject of Multi-Cloud deployment, I had my hands on session on the latest release (April 2019) of Qlik Sense Enterprise for Kubernetes. I have to say that product have come a long way and the new cloud hub certainly is a great improvement over the windows offering. The new cloud hub makes collaborations a lot simpler (sharing a work-space with other developers/analysts), takes a lot of the administrative tasks away from the QMC (Publishing, sharing work-space, creating tasks etc) and placing them at the cloud hub. There would be some steep learning curves for those who are not familiar with Docker and Kubernetes to deal with deployment, but once Qlik Sense is deployed, it feels more intuitive. There are some functionalities that are still missing and not all APIs are available on Kubernetes yet, but we were told they are on the road map and we should see them in the next 2 releases or so. This might not be a big of an issue for some but those who have a lot of automation/integrations might want to wait until those releases.
Top Visulisation Extension Building Takeaway
This is probably a very early days but it’s something that I really am excited about when come to visualisation development – Nebula.js. This is collection of JavaScript libraries which helps the developers to automate lot of the processes and build tasks (think of it as a boilerplate generator via CLI, API for consuming Qlik Engine, all in one solution). It’s in its infancy right now and only an alpha build available. I haven’t yet played with this but attended the presentation session with non other than Hannes Lindquist (@_carlhannes) and Christof Schwarz (@cschwarz74) of Qlik, guys behind this project. And their demonstration of the usage of this really got me intrigued. Combined that with Picasso.js, anyone can build Qlik visualisation within hours if not minutes.
Top Qlik Engine Takeaway for .net Developers
Enigma.net – This is probably not a new news to many, I was aware of it for a quite some time but for me as a .net enthusiast (.net core now) seeing a live session from Konrad Mattheis (@qlik2go), I am now very excited about this. I am looking forward to playing with this in the coming weeks. This has already out performed the Qlik .net sdk and combined that with qlik-engineapi, it really has the potential to speed up the development and makes the developers life a bit more easier. A little bit of love for the .net developers from the Qlik team! We truly appreciate it madam/sir.
Other Highlights
Qlik bringing Attunity and Data Catalyst to the family were the other highlights for me. Qlik finally breaking out from just another BI data discovery/visualisation tool offering to an agnostic BI platform offering and providing end to end data solutions. I haven’t used these two products personally to pass any judgements, so I will leave that for another time. ABDI should get a mention here too. Ability to query a large data set for insight with impressive speed is truly amazing but would like to see some technical specifications of the architecture on this before starting to get too excited I guess. I was also hyped about how ML and NLP were being used in the Qlik R&D for the conversational analytics piece. Looking really powerful and has a lot of potential. Looking forward to more on this in the coming months.
Special Mentions
It wouldn’t be a great show without some great people behind it. So thank you to all who worked so hard behind and front of the scene. Also big thanks to Tahola and the team for putting up with me during the trip.
Until next time…
Kabir's blog 
Nice one Kab. On the last day I Mr Poole writing a qliksense document that called Nprint and created users, filters and documents on the fly. Blew my mind.
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