Tuesday, June 12, 2012

And now we are Qlikies

Today Expressor Software, the little data integration software company I work for, was acquired by Qliktech, makers of the Qlikview Business Discovery Platform. This is very good development for us; Expressor Studio complements Qlikview very nicely, and since Qliktech is a rapidly growing, publicly traded company,we're going to have a lot more development horsepower to move our product forward.

Expressor has come along way since I joined almost three years ago. We introduced a completely new UI in late 2010, along with a mostly-new data movement engine (the piece I work on), and each of the subsequent releases has added major new functionality.

But beyond the software, we've also become a highly productive engineering team. We've been introducing a new release every 3 months or so for the past 18 months. Without the close coordination we have among our UI, repository, engine and QA teams, we never could have done this without sacrificing product quality -- but we've kept the quality up, and even managed significant internal improvements that helped performance and stability while we did this. This is a great group of people to work with, and even though we've been working our butts off, I've really enjoyed the work.

Next week we're all going to Qliktech's office in Lund, Sweden, for an introduction to our engineering counterparts - and to celebrate midsummer. It's not technically a vacation - but it sure is a nice break from our usual routine. It's a pretty amazing way of welcoming us into the company. Katy is coming with me, and we'll be spending a few days on either end of the trip exploring Copenhagen.

Qliktech, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. (roll credits)