TalkTalk selects QlikView over Tableau for ‘cheaper and easier deployment’

Broadband, phone and mobile company TalkTalk has selected business intelligence software provider QlikView's Business Discovery platform ahead of Tableau's rival offering because QlikView was "cheaper and easier to deploy".

The TalkTalk operations team has to produce reports across all functions of the business, responding to data requests from other teams including the commercial and compliance divisions, and it found that its process for doing so was not fit for purpose.

"There was a vast amount of data that the team had to mine every day. We had to extract the data and put it into our own data mart then build Excel reports out of those, and we would spend about 40 per cent of the time pulling data out manually and pushing it back out to the end users," Peter Cullen, head of provisioning management information and analysis at TalkTalk, told Computing.

"We had to find a solution to become more agile in our development approach and to automate a number of abilities," he added.

Cullen explained that previously, TalkTalk used a mixture of different approaches.

"We used Business Objects to interrogate our data warehouse and bring back information, which we put onto our data mart. We were going through data warehouse development at the same time, too, so we had queries running back directly from our operational data store and on our SQL server, which were clashing. We tried to join all of that information together and presented it on Excel – this could work in an SME but not for TalkTalk," he said.

Cullen and his team started to look around the current processes and systems used within TalkTalk and stumbled across the personal version of QlikView, which a few people were using.

"What we saw looked pretty good so we briefed QlikView and asked them how to approach our problem and what their recommended solution was," he added.

However, TalkTalk looked at other alternatives before confirming its decision.

"We had a look at the likes of Tableau but what we found was that most of the solutions that we did look at were rather costly, whereas QlikView was generally a lot cheaper to deploy and the time to deploy was minimal," Cullen explained.