What do you do if you’re a young software company trying to compete with the marketing budgets of Microsoft, IBM and SAP?

QlikTech, the world’s fastest growing software company for the past four years, according to the International Data Corporation, may have an answer for you.

Rather than trying to punch above its weight, QlikTech introduced a viral sales technique for its Business Intelligence (BI) technology “QlikView” – and it’s been winning the company 12 new customers globally per day.

QlikTech provides a simple, point-and-click way to view multi-dimensional data and information. It can create a working example of a BI implementation using a customer’s data within an hour at the very first sales meeting.

"This helps to create a buzz around the product," explains Andy Honess, QlikTech’s UK sales director. "Generally speaking, we only need a few days to build an application whereas it would take the majority of our competitors a few weeks to simply break the back of it. We’re also able to collate a much higher volume of data than anyone else."

Not only is the solution much quicker to implement than traditional BI products, but it is also cheaper, according to Honess. “We have a corporate slogan, ‘half the time, quarter of the cost and twice the value’, which is a powerful sales proposition in any industry but I actually think these are very conservative estimates.”

However, potential customers have been sceptical: it is faster and cheaper than traditional BI technologies and it also takes a completely different approach from the solutions of its competitors. For this reason, QlikTech never tried to sell QlikView en masse or try to go head-to-head in pitches against the big brand competitors.

Instead it adopted a softer approach by finding gaps in the current BI operations. “To begin with, we definitely sold under the radar to departmental-based projects and smaller enterprises that weren’t being served by the bigger players. But we have now got to a point where we are fully confident about taking on some of the big boys.”

Indeed, in addition to winning over thousands of SMEs, QlikTech customers now include large corporations such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Lloyds TSB. The company has 5,922 customers in 74 countries – totalling more than 266,000 users – and has achieved an impressive 500 per cent growth year on year for 2005-06.

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