
Qlik acquired by Thoma Bravo for $3B - dgudkov
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160602005740/en/Qlik-Announces-Agreement-Acquired-Thoma-Bravo-30.50
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dgudkov
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.

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jackmaney
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.

~~~
_9MOTHER9HORSE
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.

~~~
chris_wot
Is it really though? I tried to find more info on Qliksense and perhaps I'm
not looking hard enough, but I can't see a decent rundown of why it is
superior.

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dgudkov
Qlik Sense is about 10% faster than QlikView 11, although QlikView 12 got the
same engine as Qlik Sense so they're on par now.

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mathattack
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=...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AQLIK&fstype=ii&ei=IdVQV_naKMqxiwKiyby4CA)

~~~
sjbase
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.

~~~
mathattack
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.

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

~~~
chris_wot
They still are!

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

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dopamean
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
Naming and hearing of are very different things.

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aaronbrethorst
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?

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cthulhu-bot
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.

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frik
I guess Compuware, Detroit / Dynatrace.

Or Riverbed.

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

~~~
cthulhu-bot
Several similar products indeed. Since I was at none of the above it seems
they have a track record now and people should know what to expect.

