“Today, every organization is looking to AI for competitive advantage, but adoption is difficult. This is where our focus lies. “
Hi Hiroshi, please tell us about your role in the company and how you arrived at Qlik.
I am the Country Manager for Qlik Japan since October 2019 and I’m responsible for growing the business with our robust partner ecosystem. Along with improving data literacy in Japan, I am driving Qlik’s Japan business to support our customers with our end-to-end data platform to help them innovate their digital business and ultimately improve Japan’s global competitiveness.
My previous experience in the data protection space has armed me with valuable insights to drive DX strategies for large organizations. With Qlik’s impressive technologies across, data quality, integration, and analytics, I felt confident to help customers bring more value to their business and stakeholders.
So, I decided to join Qlik.
How has the data integration market evolved in your region in the last 2-3 years? What are the major factors that are driving the data integration and analytics market?
The effects of the pandemic, as well as global inflation and conflicts that affected the global market has made the importance of real-time data to prompt decision-making and action more pronounced. An increasing number of companies are overcoming this challenge by integrating data scattered throughout the company, combining it with external data, and taking prompt action based on new insights and knowledge gained from real-time analysis of what is happening now.
Please tell us more about your recent collaboration with Hitachi Omika Japan?
What are the major areas of focus where Qlik analytics will deliver its tools and expertise?
Hitachi, Ltd. has adopted Qlik analytics with additional services within its Hitachi Omika Works. This has enabled the division to analyze and draw insights from data, enabling better risk analysis while eliminating ambiguity for faster decision making across its organization.
What are the unique needs of supply chain data?
What makes Qlik-Talend the go-to solution for solving the supply chain challenges?
The challenges in the supply chain market, due to diversifying user needs and tight demand for components, have placed a high priority on preparing information visualization and risk analysis for the entire supply chain. In addition, huge amounts of data are often siloed and managed in Excel, which often leads to serious inefficiencies in supply chain management.
By utilizing Qlik, the fluid situation of suppliers can be integrated and analyzed, and supply chain processes can be easily visualized.
Please tell us about the best data integration and analytics features that makes Qlik an outstanding vendor in the current landscape.
Qlik understands that organizations are looking for pragmatic ways to leverage AI to make better, faster decisions, right now.
Our competitors have made many announcements that promise future products or vision. Our difference is that Qlik customers are already using AI, including leveraging a proven and trusted LLM and a full range of AI-enhanced analytics. Additionally, with Qlik Staige, our customers and partners are transforming organizations – as evidenced by more than 100,000 AI models built using Qlik AutoML.
What are your growth plans for the APJ region?
Today every organization is looking to AI for competitive advantage, but adoption is difficult. This is where our focus lies. We want to work with customers and leaders who are cautious about going too fast due to risk, governance, and trust concerns. Our objective is simple – we want to help large organiztions scale and grow with the a robust data strategy. We’ve heard our customers and we’re investing in helping them build a trusted data foundation for AI, leverage modern AI-enhanced analytics, and deploy AI for advanced use cases. We are here to help them win with data to emerge competitively strong and sound.
How do you work with the AI and machine learning capabilities for the modern data integration landscape?
We’re helping customers confidently embrace the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) while delivering tangible value. Especially with Qlik Staige, customers can innovate and move faster by making secure and governed AI part of everything they can do with Qlik – from experimenting with and implementing generative AI models to developing AI-powered predictions.
We are helping deliver governed and trusted data to organizations like Airbus and J.B. Hunt. Qlik’s data integration and quality solutions leverage AI to automate data delivery and transformation, reducing complexity, mitigating risk, and enabling data fabrics. Innovations include:
- AI-enhanced data quality offering diagnostics and remediation on incomplete, corrupt / unreliable data.
- Connectors to key AI infrastructure including ChatGPT, Hugging Face, expert.ai, and Amazon SageMaker with upcoming support for Microsoft Fabric and vector databases.
- Reduced manual coding with prompt-based generation of custom SQL transformation logic.
Read More: ITechnology Interview with Charles Fan, Co-Founder at MemVerge
Thank you, Hiroshi! That was fun and we hope to see you back on CIO Influence Interview Series again!
[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]
Hiroshi is the Country Manager of Qlik Japan. He is responsible for leading Qlik’s Japanese operations while empowering organizations to enhance their data strategy, uncover growth opportunities and solve business problems by utilizing data. A veteran in the enterprise technology sector with more than twenty years of experience Hiroshi has previously served several roles with marquee tech brands that include, IBM, SAP and Microsoft.
Qlik, with the recent addition of Talend®, delivers an industry-leading portfolio of solutions for data integration, data quality and analytics. This includes advancements in real-time data, AI, ML, and automation. The most successful organizations are investing in data to make sense of the increasing amounts and varieties of data from diverse sources. The challenge is to effectively integrate, analyze and act on the data while ensuring its trustworthiness. With more than 40,000 active customers in over 100 countries, Qlik’s solutions work with virtually any data source, target, architecture, or methodology, to ensure customers have the data they need, whenever they need it.
