Qlik debuts new data integration and curation tools for generative AI systems

Data integration platform provider Qlik Tech International AB this week debuted a new product called the Qlik Talend Cloud, saying it’s designed to deliver high quality, trusted data to artificial intelligence systems. It was announced alongside a new generative AI assistant that promises to help companies make better use of their unstructured data.

The announcements came earlier this week during the company’s annual Qlik Connect event in Orlando. There, it also revealed strategic alliances with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Snowflake Inc.

During Qlik Connect, the company was keen to stress the importance of good data and proper data management in enabling successful AI strategies. Qlik is well-placed to be the foundation for many enterprises’ AI initiatives, having established itself as a leader in both data analytics and data integration. Over the past few years, it has made a string of acquisitions that aimed to cement its position in the latter segment, with its most important being Talend Inc., a provider of data integration tools that was snapped up for an undisclosed price in May 2023.

The new Qlik Talend Cloud offering represents the fruit of that acquisition, and is said to merge comprehensive data integration capabilities with tools to ensure data quality and governance.

Qlik Talend Cloud is built on Qlik’s cloud infrastructure platform and its main focus is on maintaining the integrity of data for AI operations, the company said. It offers a unified package of data integration and curation features that will enable customers to create and deploy AI-augmented extract, load and transform pipelines to deliver trusted data to AI systems.

Qlik’s chief executive officer Mike Capone told CRN in an interview that the new offering will help companies to “rapidly and easily build and deploy data pipelines, from raw data all the way through, with our capabilities of data integration, data lake management, data quality, data governance and data transformation.”

The offering comes with a range of data engineering tools to support transformation initiatives, and integrates software-as-a-service data connectivity capabilities, enabling users to work with diverse sources of information. There’s also a curated data marketplace within the platform that aids in data discovery and sharing, while the Qlik Talend Trust Score for AI will assess the health and quality of any dataset, providing an overall “AI-readiness score”, the company said.

The platform will become available later this year, beginning with a Qlik Talend Cloud Starter Package. It will be followed by other editions of the platform later.

Qlik also announced a new Qlik Answers platform that incorporates technology obtained from the company’s acquisition of a startup called Kyndi Inc. in January. It’s described as an out-of-the-box, generative AI-powered assistant that can aid users in searching through, accessing and making use of unstructured data. It’s said to be especially adept at searching through PDF and Word documents, webpages and Microsoft Sharepoint files.

Capone explained that the tool gives customers the ability to harness their unstructured data and obtain more value from it. “You can synthesize all this crazy unstructured data [that’s] all over your enterprise and make sense of it and ask questions of it,” he promised.

The multi-year strategic collaboration announced with AWS will see Qlik’s software integrated with the cloud computing giant’s cloud and generative AI technologies, improving the ability of customers to leverage data for AI tasks. For instance, Qlik’s data platforms will be married with Amazon Bedrock for AI development. In addition, Qlik said it will make it easier for customers to integrate data from SAP environments with AI applications running on AWS.

Another area of focus is in data compliance and privacy, with Qlik providing tools to enhance these operations across multiple AWS regions.

Finally, Qlik revealed that it has become one of the earliest adopters of Snowflake’s new Cortex AI service, which provides access to that company’s nascent family of large language models.

Earlier this week, Capone dropped by SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE during its coverage of Qlik Connect, where he discussed the company’s ambition to make its data integration, governance and analytics platforms essential for AI workloads:

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