The COVID-19 pandemic showed that what can differentiate a winning business from a losing business is the agility with which it responds to events as they happen. And to make this possible, organizations need to be equipped with continuously up-to-date, real-time information and the ability to trigger informed action when needed.

Providing this actionable data is the goal of big data company QlikTech International AB. Its Active Intelligence platform replaces the traditional, passive business intelligence that relies on preconfigured, historical data sets and wasn’t designed to support real-time decisioning and actions, according to Itamar Ankorion (pictured, left), senior vice president for technology alliances and managing director for enterprise data integration at QlikTech.

“We’re talking kind of about the intersection of what everybody wants to look to do as the next frontier of data with predictive data,” he said. “Descriptive analytics have been around for a long time, but how can we use predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics to enrich what we’ve had with descriptive analytics to at the end of the day improve the business?”

Ankorion and Kosti Vasilakakis (pictured, right), head of product growth, low-code/no-code machine learning at Amazon Web Services Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the capabilities of QlikTech’s intelligent platform, its recently announced integration with Amazon SageMaker, different use cases, and what’s to come for the QlikTech/AWS partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

Closing the chasm between data and business teams

To enable what QlikTech calls “the next age of BI,” it is constantly expanding its portfolio of capabilities. The most recent releases, announced this week, were a connector for Amazon SageMaker and an integration with Amazon SageMaker Autopilot. The idea is to extend the breadth of analytics tools already available in Qlik Cloud, providing seamless integration with Amazon’s advanced machine learning capabilities through the Qlik Active Intelligence Platform, according to Ankorion.

“So, as you’re working an application, as you’re interacting with your data, dynamically data is interchanged between Qlik and SageMaker, enriching your decision-making, your actions with predictive data sets,” he explained. “Qlik … will bring real-time data in, prepare it for analytics, and then feed that real-time data to SageMaker to get the real-time prediction back in the same experience for the user.”

For customers, it means bridging the chasm between the data science world and the business teams, according to Vasilakakis.

“The data science teams are building machine learning models to make predictions, and now with the first integration, we actually expose those machine learning models in an application that the business team uses, Qlik. And with the same dashboards that they are very familiar with, they can now trigger those machine learning models and get real-time predictions in the dashboards themselves powered by machine learning,” he stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: QlikTech International AB sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither QlikTech nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE