Qlik Connect 2025 | David Zember, Qlik

David Zember, Qlik

David Zember Discusses Strategic Alliances at Qlik Connect 2025 David Zember, senior vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at Qlik, joins theCUBE hosts to delve into the key themes and innovations at Qlik Connect 2025. Held in Orlando, Florida, the event highlights Qlik's transition from analytics solutions to comprehensive data platform services, emphasizing collaborative ecosystems, modernization strategies, and the integration of artificial intelligence, or AI. In this insightful discussion, Zember draws on extensive experience to underscore the importance of fostering strategic partnerships. They outline how Qlik's evolving platform centers on results and execution, aiming to provide end-to-end solutions for customers. The conversation, facilitated by analysts at theCUBE Research, traverses data trust and availability, essential for partners and customer success. The backing from key industry players such as Amazon Web Services, Databricks, and Snowflake is noted as a crucial factor in propelling Qlik's innovation and expanding its global reach. Highlighting significant takeaways, Zember posits that data modernization is pivoting beyond mere migration, tackling complex strategic integration. According to Zember, embracing a flexible ecosystem model allows customers the choice they need to succeed, accentuating that collaboration rather than competition propels solution delivery. Recognizing that domain expertise is critical, Qlik's investment in partnerships is geared towards leveraging local insights and fostering loyalty, positioning the company for a future where AI becomes integral to analytics.

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David Zember, Qlik

David Zember

SVP, Worldwide Channels and Alliances Qlik

David Zember, senior vice president for worldwide channels and alliances at QlikTech International AB, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Qlik Connect to explore how Qlik is reshaping its role from analytics provider to full-spectrum data platform partner. The conversation focuses on the power of partnerships, the shift toward AI-infused platforms, and how ecosystem collaboration drives value at scale.

Zember outlines Qlik’s commitment to delivering results through strategic alliances with companies such as Amazon Web Services, Databri... Read more

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What are partners, sellers, and customers excited about in terms of the new platform being launched? add

What was the decision made regarding Partner Summit and Clickconnect after Sales Kickoff? add

What is a key advantage for partners in utilizing the Click platform? add

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David Zember, Qlik

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>> Welcome back, everyone. theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Clickconnect 2025. I'm John Furrier with Bob Laliberte. Breaking down all the action. Bringing you all the data here live. David Zember's here, back on theCUBE, Senior Vice President Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Click. David, great to see you. Welcome back to theCUBE.

David Zember

>> Thank you. Great to be here.

>> CUBE alumni year two. Okay, so the theme last year was answers weaved in, semi-stole the show, but you had the analytics cloud booming. Now you've got the cloud, answers together across one platform, almost a one-stop shop. It's a perfect innovation storm. What's new this year? The theme is results. Execution.

David Zember

>> 100%.

>> What's the update?

David Zember

>> Look, we're super excited. I think partners, sellers, our customers, really excited about the opportunity to have a platform that does everything that goes end to end. And this is a big leap forward for us in terms of our innovation to bring ClickTalent Cloud together, bringing that to market in a way that brings value to customers, having more innovation into the analytics platform, and then just giving customers the choice and the ability to accelerate to the results. And that's a big theme for us.

>> Mike on the keynote talked a lot about the open lake house service, fully-managed service. Of course cloud, analytics cloud is key mentioned answers. But one theme was precision and trust, but he kind of pointed out that you've got to get the broad X of the data. Data brings people together.

David Zember

>> Right.

>> You're in the people connection business for channels and partners. It's important to have one-stop shop for the data. So you've got to bring everything in to be addressable from a data. That means partner data, customer data. So having data availability is also a connection point.

David Zember

>> Yeah.

>> Can you share your thoughts on that and that what that means to the partners, their relationships, how they do business, how they unlock the value?

David Zember

>> I'll say this as Mike was talking about that this morning. I thought about the early days of cloud migrations and customers were eager to adopt cloud infrastructure to run their workloads. And what we used to say was the cloud exposes a lot of really bad practices by customers because it won't work. You hide all these things in your code and in your applications, in your workloads. You move them to cloud and cloud exposes all that. We're seeing that right now with data. Customers have a lot of data. They've got old data. We talked about the customers with mainframes from the '70s and DB2 and blah, blah, blah. All the way through to today. The things that are hidden in that data are the gap between 80% are interested in it and 20% are getting value out of it. And the customers, we've got to help the customers get a handle on their data and their data strategy and get that data trusted or we're never going to close that gap between the 80, 85, 90% of interest and the 20, 25% of value where we are today.

>> So migration is not so much a migration, it's a modernization effort. What does that look like when they realize they've got this complex mess? What is the strategy? What happens next? What's that modernization? How does it flip to a modernization play?

David Zember

>> Yeah, I think the thing, and I think the partners come into play here, the ecosystem comes into play. When you have great domain expertise, financial services, life sciences, insurance, whatever, those different domains, you're able to connect the dots between all these systems of records, all the adjacent data and all the systems and partners and everything else that you've got. And you're able to get your hands around that strategy a little bit better and a little bit faster. And then you can think about a customer needs choice around how they modernize. And it can't be an all or nothing. It can't be all cloud and no premise. It can't be all one vendor. No one vendor can deliver everything for every customer. And so I think curating the ecosystem, giving customers choice, and then walking alongside of them is the way to accelerate this. Maybe go a little bit slower to go faster eventually. Yeah.

>> Now I'm wondering if you could touch upon your Power of Three strategy that you've implemented and how that's enabling your partners as well.

David Zember

>> Yeah. Power of Three, it's the notion that it could be Power of Four, right? It's the notion that no one vendor's going to deliver everything. And so as you discover who is in play in the ecosystem with customers you have to sit around that table with people you trust and then dive in and work on solving problems. And this is a big shift for people who are used to sitting across the table from a procurement person or from an executive and arguing about, "Do you want to buy my software?" And now we shouldn't be doing that anymore. You've curated your ecosystem, you've got a trusted set of partners. Now we're sitting around a table, we're working to solve problems. And what we found is we're sitting around the table with the same sets of people, the cloud data warehouse, the Databricks, the Snowflake, the Amazon guys, maybe a couple of other folks in the ecosystem around governance or something like that. And that's really where the power of working together and collaborating comes into play.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. So it's really that shift from being a collection of vendors to having strategic partnerships.

David Zember

>> Right. We don't have time to write RFPs and respond to all these things. People don't want to do that anymore. They want to try the solution. They want to get to value quickly. If that fails, they want to throw it away, try something different. And you can't do that with a 1990s and early 2000s procurement cycle. It just won't, it just can't do it.

>> David, talk about for the folks that may not know all the details, what is your strategy for your partners and your channels? What's the value proposition? And how do people engage with Click and what's in it for them?

David Zember

>> We've got great partners around the world. I'm constantly amazed at how loyal and educated and insightful and innovative our partners are. They're great. They love Click, they love our teams, and they lean in. The thing that our partners bring to the discussion really, like I said, is domain expertise. And then some horizontal expertise around these solutions. And you need both. If you're in banking and finance and you don't speak that language, you lose all your credibility. But if you don't understand the technology you also don't have any credibility. And so when we get to the table, we bring those two things together. And so that's how we think about the value that our partners add. On our side, what we're trying to do is make it simple to do business with Click, make it profitable to do business with Click and make it predictable to do business with Click. And it's a simple combination but surprisingly effective to test the ideas and the strategies that we've got, is it simple, is it predictable, and can they make money? And if they can't, then they're not going to work.

>> And it's a massive growth curve. Our CUBE research team that Bob's and is doing some work, and we're finding out that there's more reliance on partners now on new opportunities. Obviously cloud-native is growing, AI's going to sit on top of that, on-prem distributed computing. But there's now an energy in the channel and the partners to actually deliver new sets of services. Could you share your thoughts on some stories or examples of what are some of those opportunities? Because the partners are close to the customer.

David Zember

>> Yeah. No, for sure.

>> They're going to make more money. Obviously high margins, gross profit are on services. So what kinds of services do you see? And what's the energy like?

David Zember

>> Well, I think there's a couple ways to answer that question. And on the very large partner side, like with our GSIs, this is the go-to-market motion. There's very little value for the GSIs to knit 10 things together. And then at the end of that hope that it delivers some sort of value. So they're already, and we're part of this with them, developing prepackaged sets of delivery mechanisms so that you can get to the value faster. And these things feel already pre-integrated, that there's an ecosystem within the solution. And it's easier for the cows and the client directors to understand that and they can go to their customers and say, "This particular thing has some things pre-wired," it solves a particular set of problems in your industry. They speak the language, go to market very quickly. So our GSI team works very closely hand-in-hand with our strategic GSIs to help curate and build those things. Then on the other end with the Click partners, they do the same thing. We've got a partner in New England who won an award yesterday, Passerelle. They simply put together for a specific industry, just a set of technologies already pre-built. And they take that to market to banks and credit unions and other financial institutions. And they're not trying to solve world hunger with this, but it's a set of things that gets to value quickly. The executives at the banks understand it, they can adopt it. It provides value immediately, and then it gives the partner a lot of credibility to come back and say, "Hey, have you thought about this?" Or, "Here's another use case. We can solve some additional problems with another ..."

>> You have a lot of partners that actually, it's a big part of house of GSI, but you have slew of other partners that can pick a specific thing, AutoML on whatever. Or --

David Zember

>> Well, the Stretch Connect acquisition of Cloud Cover is an example of that. So here we have a problem to solve, which is complexity and cloud migration. Cloud modernization of analytics. And Stretch Connect goes out and builds. So there's other partners who have done the same thing. They go out and they build this set of services and technology and IP and it solves a problem and they build it on top of Click technology. And boom, there we go.

Bob Laliberte

>> So one of the things that I latched onto there, you were talking about accelerating the time to value. One of the things that I've been following, especially as it relates to AI, agentic AI, all those things, is time to comfort. And so we had one of your customers on earlier talking to them about the time to comfort and how do you accelerate that? Getting over those cultural hurdles of AI and agentic AI and things like that. How do you do that with your partners? I assume there's a value chain. You're the most furthest along because you're developing the technology, you're living and breathing it every day. Then there's the partners, then there's the customers. So how do you accelerate the time to comfort with your partners on the technology you're developing so they can then in turn and pass that on?

David Zember

>> Great question. I think they all move at a different pace depending on what their business is. But I think all partners in the last couple of years have realized they have to think about the future. Especially if they're, we've got a lot of partners who are analytics partners. And that analytics space with agentic is going to completely transform. And so if they don't get comfortable very quickly, they will not have a business. And the things that they've got to do to deliver value for their customers is get comfortable with agentic. How are we going to think about this in relation to the way we serve our customers? And so I think GenAI gives you a false sense of security. I understand LLM, I understand natural language, I understand ChatGPT or whatever the technology is, right? Even Click Answers for knowledge assistance or knowledge spaces. That's just this much of the puzzle. We've really got to get to a place where we're comfortable with the agents doing work and they're comfortable with the framework that is there to help them build agentic experiences. We're doing that a couple of different ways. I think we've launched in the partner hub, this year we launched a new partner hub, big labor of love for us. That coincided with the launch of a new learning portal. We're trying to treat the partners just like we treat our salespeople, trying to get them both comfortable with the same content, with the same learning, the same certifications. And I think that's a good way to get them started and they'll make their way to the comfort station. That's a bad analogy.

>> Time to get comfort is immediately. I mean, your point about that is not that they've got a gun to their head, literally speaking. But the fact is the data unlock, the value that's unlocked from the data is quantifiable. And to your point, you're either out of business because your competitors will get there.

David Zember

>> Yeah. Someone's going to figure that out. So you better get on it very quickly. Yeah.

>> What's the biggest thing you've seen in the channel if you could point to one megatrend around either channel formation, obviously a long tail. There's a lot of specialty partners, because you're an enablement platform. I can see that clearly. The platform clearly is enabling value with business logic. So whoever's got the point of logic wins the value, right? Okay. I get that. So what have you learned? What's the big trend that you're seeing in that channel? Is it more services? Is it new solutions?

David Zember

>> Yeah. I think a couple of things come to mind on that. First of all, we've made a big bet around distribution in certain markets where it makes sense. It's just hard for us to get to the depth we need to get to with partners and you've got a million partners. And so making some bets around distribution for that long tail I think will help us get focused and go deeper with the partners who need to do that with. And then the distribution partner, making those enablement assets available to them, make sure we invest appropriately into the distribution partners so that they can become a scaling mechanism for us with that long tail keeps us from losing that long-tail business. So that's one thing that we're working, one area where we're working. And I think that one holds a lot of promise for us. I would say the other one is more concentration of the partners in the domains where they're great. And I think this becomes super important as we make the journey down these-

>> Those tech partners, I noticed Amazon Web Services on stage. They're a big partner. What's the relationship with AWS and who are some of your other big partners?

David Zember

>> The relationship with Amazon is great and getting greater. I mean, we cannot be in a better place right now than we are with Amazon. We've got great executive alignment. Our SEA is delivering results that SEA helped us fund a lot of headcount. That is where some of the innovation, that's where that materialized. So we would not be where we are today without a lot of that investment from Amazon. So super pleased with that. We've got a dedicated team of people who drive our co-selling activity led by Jessica in North America. If that continues to grow we'll be able to reproduce that around the world. And so we've got a lot of good co-marketing, co-selling, co-developing, all that is in full motion and we're really happy with that. We want to produce some of the similar, we're going to take some of those learnings and apply them to Databricks and Snowflake, and so we'll spend a lot of time this year working on those things, working with engineering, and working with the product teams to make sure we've got the right levels of support with Snowflake and Databricks to bring some of these things to life for our joint customers.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, it makes sense. And clearly it was showing based on the audience I was sitting around today, you definitely have a global representation today. It's no longer just North America. Your partnerships are now spanning the globe.

David Zember

>> Well, we had over 600 partners at Partner Summit. And after we got back from Sales Kickoff, we sat around the table and thought about Partner Summit and Clickconnect, and what do we want to do with that? And collectively our team decided, "Let's turn it back into a partner show." That's what it used to be. And so we set about to make sure we had great representation from around the world. So we really, we've got a lot of people from Asia-Pac, which is always a great thing to have is to have our Asia-Pac partners here. So we've got some great Asia-Pac partners. Our LATAM team showed up in full force and that's always fun to have them around as well in full. So saw Takato in a bunch of orange T-shirts running around so that was great. So we're just really excited about the partners and they're leaning in. It's great.

>> It's got a great ecosystem. And I talked to a few partners last night at the reception, very loyal base.

David Zember

>> Big time.

>> Where's that loyalty come from? I kind of know the answer. I would like you to say, is it from the stickiness of the value they're getting out of the data? And what does the new Click look like? As agents come in I think you're going to see a multiplier effect because you guys are going to have agents behind the agents. The prompts are going to get easier, the questions to get the answers.

David Zember

>> Yeah, no doubt.

>> What does the new ecosystem look like?

David Zember

>> Well, the loyalty, I think to answer your loyalty question, some of these partners have been around from the very beginning. We have partners who their domain is actually Click and then the name of the country that they supported. So they've been around for ... I think I met one partner who actually bet the farm. He mortgaged the farm to become a Click partner.

>> He literally bet the farm.

David Zember

>> Literally bet the farm on Click. And so contrast that with some companies who have partners who are partners of many things, we've got partners that Click is all they do. They don't have anything else. So their loyalty is necessary but it's also been around a long time. They've been around a long time. And so we love them. We're not perfect. If you know anything about Click, you know we're not perfect but we work really hard to serve our partners and our customers well. And I think that's reflected back in how much they love Click and that's driven a lot of loyalty.

>> Great opportunity for partners. I mean, more services, more margin, more money making. Tons of domain experts out there. Again, the business logic is sitting in these domains.

David Zember

>> That they manage.

>> The platform is horizontal but the business logic is at the point of sale or point of service.

David Zember

>> Right. Right. Correct. That's exactly right. Yep.

>> Any new strategies that you're deploying? What's on your agenda this year? More of the same? Keep expanding. You mentioned distribution. What are your goals?

David Zember

>> Yeah, we've expanded the team. So we've added some resources to go even deeper with some of the partners. We've invested in the new regions. So we didn't just launch a region in MEA, we built an entire team that's ecosystem-led, it's ecosystem first. So Tejas is down there going to town with the ecosystem in MEA, we're excited about that. We'll make a few pivots in certain geographies where the regional SIs will have more of an impact in how we think about going to market and how we deliver some of these solutions so we'll adjust where we need to there. And then I'm really excited about the roadmap for new regions. We have a lot of public sector business around the world. In some places it's 50% of our business. And so having a region locally really answers a lot of the questions that customers have around sovereignty and accessibility and latency and all those things. So having a region in Brazil and other places like that will be a big win for us especially with the move to cloud initiative. So we're aligned with the overall Click strategy and then the partners are aligned to that as well.

>> Sounds great. David, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great update. Congratulations again. Building on last year's momentum, continuing to grow. GenAI is the tailwind. I'm John Furrier with Bob Laliberte here, getting you all the data. Click 2025. Thanks for watching.