What I’m doing with Branch is similar to Qlik, but with focus. Qlik delivers data better and faster than most data projects can deliver. At its heart, Qlik trusts that data is the language of business and speaking this language well influences how things get done. Doing data slow, making a project out of a task, or only delivering half measures is a losing strategy. With automated pipelines that can improve data quality and completeness, Qlik has a winning strategy.

Qlik is a business intelligence pipeline and we’re in the business intelligence business. Why not just use Qlik?

Branch is an engine to create new business processes. Branch focuses on the complexity of life and uses agreement to make sense of it. Specifically, Branch focuses on the bureaucracies, policies, regulations, road blocks, and details that make collaboration difficult. You find these kinds of problems when signing a contract, collecting payment on invoices, hiring or firing people, and expanding the business. By focusing on the agreements first, we start to figure out where the risks are, where to focus people’s attention.

To get this done, Branch is creating an automated pipeline. The data architecture is an event log at its center. The processing workflow assembles data with processes and provisions the outputs effectively. Every bit of awareness and functionality we seek works on an automated data pipeline. That’s why I can admire Qlik but not want to use them for our core product.

Strategically, our end game is a world where people are more reactive to what’s happening now. Qlik’s end game is a world where people can leverage the past to give context for what’s happening now. Our coalition is with product owners that care deeply about particular business processes and want to solve a narrow set of problems for a company. Qlik’s coalition is with IT managers who are tasked with provisioning data that people will actually use. Our proving ground is whether people do their jobs better, whether companies are more effective in the long run. Qlik’s proving ground is whether people are leveraging more of their data in the short or mid term.

It’s a little strange to write up why we’re not using a dissimilar technology stack for our company. At its heart, many of the things Qlik does well to succeed would give us a temporary advantage, we could buy our way forward instead of building everything from scratch. Strategically, the unit costs we must control, the ability to do some processing in the first milliseconds after an event occurs, and the ability to account for many fine-grained security decisions leads me to identify Qlik as a company and technology I admire, but not one I plan to use.