AWS Case Study: QlikTech

The Business Challenges

QlikTech has a partner ecosystem of more than 1400 partners worldwide. The company knew that an online marketplace would be an important channel to showcase the partners’ applications, connectors, and extensions to its QlikView Business Discovery platform. “Enabling our partners is fundamental to accelerating our growth,” says Drew Clarke, VP of Business Development for QlikView. “By providing our partners with a cloud-based marketplace, we increase visibility and access to their specialized market skills, which provides value for their customers and advance their success.” The difficulty, however, was that QlikTech needed to build and integrate cloud computing solutions from Jive Software, Magento, and salesforce.com into an easy-to-use marketplace.

Why Amazon Web Services

After exploring a variety of options, QlikTech decided to build its marketplace, QlikMarket, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and salesforce.com. According to QlikTech, this approach aligned perfectly with its current IT initiatives and rapid development environment. The AWS Cloud also proved to have the scalability, usability, and on-demand pricing required to support the application’s intricate architecture and demanding scalability requirements.

QlikTech turned to Model Metrics, an Advanced Consulting Partner member of the AWS Partner Network, to manage the QlikMarket deployment because of the company’s experience deploying multi-cloud solutions using social and mobile technologies. Working with Model Metrics, QlikTech used the following services from AWS to build the QlikMarket application:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run the Magento e-Commerce platform
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to operate and scale the MySQL database for the application
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store products and provide access to downloads to customers
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for persistent storage and snapshots for backup and disaster recovery
• Elastic Load Balancing to load balance the front-end servers
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to queue messages between cloud solutions
• Amazon CloudFront to cache data closer to the global user footprint
• Amazon Route53 to handle all DNS requests

Figure 1 demonstrates the architecture that integrates AWS with salesforce.com and other cloud solutions to create QlikMarket.

Figure 1: QlikMarket Application Architecture

With AWS as the foundation, the QlikMarket marketplace application enables data integration with salesforce.com and interoperability with Jive’s Social Business Platform and Magento’s e-commerce platform technology. Jive’s Social Business Platform provides the existing customer community with instant access to products. QlikTech can use the Salesforce CRM and Partner Portal to track, monitor and assist partners with sales and marketing opportunities driven by the marketplace.

The Business Benefits

By using AWS and Model Metrics, QlikTech was able to create a scalable, secure and highly portable application. The resulting QlikMarket application provides an easy way for partners to create a profile, list products and services, as well as generate opportunities and leads in their respective regions. QlikMarket provides a wide array of products targeted at organizations with specific needs across various industries by streamlining how customers can discover and try new applications.

“By leveraging AWS and Model Metrics’ expertise, we were able to build an open cloud platform that helps us to build closer relationships with our partners and open new lines of business for them to increase their value to their customers,” says Drew Clarke, VP of Business Development.

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Added February 20, 2013