Qlik acquired by Thoma Bravo for $3B

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160602005740/en/Qlik-Announces-Agreement-Acquired-Thoma-Bravo-30.50

by dgudkov • 10 years ago

87 44 10 years ago

What is this, and why is this on the front page of HN? Are either Qlik or Thoma Bravo companies that I should know about?

parasubvert• 10 years ago

Qlik is one of the major data visualization tools like Tableau.

This is part of a trend of activist investors and/or private equity taking companies private because the Street has unrealistic expectations.

mark_integerdsv2• 10 years ago

Interesting, could you point to some other examples or otherwise expand a bit on this please?

I work in the field and I'm currently looking at choosing software, this info might be very important in these decisions.

elgabogringo• 10 years ago

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=qlik

quadrature• 10 years ago

I think they mean it more in the context of why its relevant to HN. usually we only talk about acquisitions of YC companies.

_RPM• 10 years ago

All due respect, but i'm not sure it's a violation of the rules for a link about a company to be on the front page without you knowing who the company is.

aaronbrethorst3• 10 years ago

It's not. I was looking for context beyond what a press release could provide. All due respect.

jacquesm2• 10 years ago

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/thoma-bravo

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qliktech#/entity

cthulhu-bot2• 10 years ago

Thoma Bravo is and let me tell you why.

The last company I worked at went through an acquisition with Thoma Bravo and the very next day after acquisition was confirmed we walked into the office and there were security guards in suits with ear pieces patrolling the office. At 9am they locked half of us in conference rooms and told us that everyone who wasn't in a conference room was getting laid off. We weren't allowed to leave the conference rooms for an hour out of "respect" for everyone gathering their stuff into boxes and they said that the security was there for "our safety". Thoma Bravo is currently bleeding that company dry and running it on a skeleton crew while it slowly circles the drain.

This experience has made me super wary of private equity firms in general but this company in particular.

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

That's terrible!

pinewurst• 10 years ago

Attachmate which owns SUSE Linux is another one of Thoma Bravo's creatures btw

aaronbrethorst3• 10 years ago

Awesome, thank you.

jacquesm2• 10 years ago

I guess we will know in 24 hours what happens with Qlik then.

frik• 10 years ago

I guess Compuware, Detroit / Dynatrace.

Or Riverbed.

Having several similar products ... you know what it means: https://thomabravo.com/portfolio/all/current/

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

Never heard of Thoma Bravo, but I suggest that if you have any interest in BI tools that you at least learn who Qlik are.

rshm• 10 years ago

I am unaware about the current situation, but two years back qlick related jobs used to be a high paying and in-demand.

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

They still are!

askafriend• 10 years ago

I'm hearing both names for the first time, which is quite surprising in the context of a $3B acquisition.

dopamean• 10 years ago

Is it really? The world is a big place with very many multibillion dollar companies. I'd be surprised if most people could name more than 10% of them.

gelatocar• 10 years ago

Naming and hearing of are very different things.

dgudkov5• 10 years ago

I've been following Qlik and their competition with Tableau for quite a while. Qlik is a bigger and older company than Tableau. It's more focused on the technical side of data analysis rather than on UI/UX (Tableau does the opposite). They reached the point where their old product (QlikView) has accumulated too much technical debt so they don't develop it actively anymore. But their new product (Qlik Sense) is not ready for prime time yet (again because of shortcomings in UI/UX), even though it's very ambitious as it's basically a development platform (think Meteor for analytical apps). It seems like going private would give the company management more freedom to make bold decisions. Staying public meant having extra pressure from public investors which are typically short-term-minded. All in all it's probably a good move for Qlik.

jackmaney• 10 years ago

About three years ago, I was at a place that used Qlikview, and it was the worst software I've ever used in my life. It's technically able to handle larger datasets than Excel, but it's much slower than Excel at any kind of analysis or aggregation, it doesn't make use of SQL (even though the data it handles is tabular...instead, it uses a home-brewed, mangled, and inferior query language), and its visualizations and UI are sub-par compared to Tableau.

Good riddance.

_9MOTHER9HORSE2• 10 years ago

As the parent comment mentions, QlikView is now the previous generation product, and Qlik Sense is where they are moving towards.

Qlik Sense is pretty snappy, has much improved UX, etc.

Qlik are top-right quadrant for BI tools, on a par with Tableau.

dgudkov5• 10 years ago

That's interesting, because I don't know what one should do to make QlikView slower than Excel. I used to do QlikView development full time for many years and I know pretty well what it's capable of, but I still can't imagine what that could be. QlikView is one of the fastest in-memory engines ever created. It's being perfected since 90s and now it's extremely optimized using techniques like JIT compilation, extensive parallelization with near linear scalability, and multiple layers of caching. Sub-second response times on datasets with tens of millions of rows on a rather average server are typical. It never came to my mind to compare it against Excel (since it's a totally different league), but I guess Qlik would be 3-4 orders of magnitude faster than Excel (PowerPivot is a different story). When you refer to QlikView's query language I guess you mean the Qlik load script which is used for initial loading data in memory. While it's indeed slow (it's single-threaded), it's never ever used for querying. It's not even technically feasible as user selections in UI can't trigger script.

QlikView does have disadvantages (mostly related to UI as you rightfully mentioned) but its performance is almost never among them.

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

I think that's not terribly fair. I agree with you in part that it's got it's problems, as I had hours worth of data lost due to its stupid way of saving a single file completely only after a reload, and it's auto-backup barfed in some strange and unexplained way, but it's reasonably snappy at aggregating and allowing for drill downs.

I personally dislike the fact it relies on natural joins so you are forced to use defined columns with the same names and use Qlik syntax to disable table linking, but others love that feature.

As an ETL tool actually it's pretty good. But if they had decided to go with straight SQL and extended it to external sources then it wouldn't have stupid syntactical EXISTS and NOT EXISTS clauses, but that's all I can really fault it on.

It's a good tool for what it does, and it turns out that what it can do is a lot! The biggest issue I found was that whilst I picked up the syntax basics in a day and it's more intricate features in a week or two, most of the Qlik developers in Australia are morons who charge a lot and deliver very little. I was very lucky to have an amazing colleague who does know his stuff, but the consultants who we were eventually forced to get in were awful. Then again, the CEO of that company was just walked out the door for gross incompetence so it was probably a combo of stupid management and a limited talent pool for Qlik devs.

gtirloni• 10 years ago

I was in charge of supporting a large QlikView installation a couple of years ago. At one point we were just deploying servers with 512GB of RAM because the dashboards kept growing and growing and the developers were having trouble identifying the causes. Over time, updates helped but I was often in Process Monitor (SysInternals) reverse engineering the whole thing and suggesting fixes, grabbing memory dumps and analyzing stack traces, etc.

It was fun because it was a puzzle and I was helping fix broken things, but at some point you just ask yourself "what for?" when things are so broken and improve very slowly.

mark_integerdsv2• 10 years ago

Qlikview is a BI product. In their day they were very promising upstarts in the industry and they really shot ahead on the back of their in memory cube processing.

It pushed them out ahead of stalwarts like Cognos and Business Objects for a while.

When Microsoft entered the BI landscape they changed the world as we knew it by bundling a fairly decent BI stack right along with MSSQL and native Excel connectors, for free.

Many big names in the enterprise space went for it (and subsequently choked on Sharepoint) but I think this hit Qlikview pretty hard. They didn't have the legacy to withstand that battering that many of the more established BI offerings took during that chapter of the story.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

Interesting on a lot of levels. One is that they quote it as being a 40% premium to when a hedge fund bought a stake supporting a sale, but only a few percent above today's close. This suggests that the market was betting on a sale at around this place. (Compare to Marketo, which sold at well above the market value)

Another interesting piece is that Qlik had a massive drop (~30%) in Q1 revenues versus Q4. [0] Enterprise software sales is seasonal, but this was pretty extreme.

Another interesting piece is their SG&A is very close to their revenue, and dwarfs R&D. This suggests that Sales and Support is what's going to get the big axe.

[0] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AQLIK&fstype=ii&ei=...

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

I can't say their support was great. Their server version seems to be full of security holes, I'm sure there are zero days circulating they don't know about.

sjbase• 10 years ago

As far as the "40% premium" goes:

This price represents a premium of 40% to the Company’s unaffected 10 day average stock price prior to March 3, 2016 of $21.83

Basically they took at 10-day average around a (somewhat) arbitrary date to price the stock for that 40% number. "Somewhat" because that date was when Eliott Management, an activist investor fund, bought a giant chunk of Qlik. That signaled a likely upcoming acquisition (which, as you said, the market was betting on). Thoma probably argues that signal moved the stock above it's "true" price.

The counterargument would be a defense of the efficient markets hypothesis: that the true price isn't about signals and technicals, it's just what someone is willing to pay.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

I would think that Elliott's acquisition was that an acquisition might happen - what surprised me was that the price barely moved after that. Usually there's some kind of bidding war at the end. Or a chance that the acquisition falls through for a while. (Look at how long it took for Yahoo to finally get moving that way) It's rare that the early information hits a bullseye 3 months later.

Qlik acquired by Thoma Bravo for $3B

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