Another sign of the increasing focus on mapping & location intelligence is Qlik's acquisition of Idevio. With the exponential rise in mobile usage, the IoT and real-time data streaming, location underpins all activities, events and outcomes. 

Location Intelligence is the term for accessing, joining and analysing this location data with all the other enterprise big data. 

This is the analytics route to competitive advantage for all enterprises, ISVs and SaaS Solution Providers.

Stalwart GIS & Mapping solutions have until now ruled the roost e.g.

You have to wonder if they are to be usurped by agile competitors in the same way Qlik, Tableau, TIBCO and others undermined SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Micro Strategy et al. 

Then you have location intelligence platform competitors like CARTO which has a same strategy as Logi Analytics. If you can't embed Location Intelligence in enterprise apps you'll never achieve the optimal analysis and decision-making competitive advantage to win in this rapidly changing world.

And if you have to rely only on BI developers, architects and data scientists you ignore the expertise of business users.

Qlik seems to be betting both ways with the acquisition of Idevio and a strategic product announcement- the Qlik Sense CARTO extension. 

Idevio is more a mapping tool; whilst CARTO is the location intelligence Full Monty ( for non Brits, the complete thing).  

For Qlik users, the extension creates an “Open in CARTO” button in your Qlik workflow or branch that can be used to send contents of your hypercube to CARTO

More than one way to skin a rabbit as they say. 

My main take is this:-

Whilst you can achieve anything with the traditional GIS vendors with enough time, big pockets and GIS developers you may no longer have that option.

In the Business Intelligence and Analytics world agile alternatives with self-service options have become the norm. It's not just the current analytics, it's the predictive analytics combining:_

  • Location Data
  • Enterprise Data
  • Big, complete, unstructured & structured data
  • Historic & Streaming data

Maybe not all at one until you have the resources but starting with more than just location data.