I recently met with Microstrategy and their marketing leadership expressed concerns about a new competitor, Qlikview. I thought it might be helpful if I analyzed the justification for their concerns.

Microstrategy is a big, established player in business intelligence, but lately a company called Qlikview has been growing much, much faster. Why is this happening?

I believe there are 3 reasons why this is happening:

  1. Qlikview has no internal challenges.
    Microstrategy has an in-house developed CRM, (no compatibility with other applications), no marketing automation and no content marketing. Building B2B demand generation from scratch is tough. Qlikview had none of those obstacles.
  2. Qlikview has savvy, aggressive marketing leadership.Microstrategy does not. While they have new marketing leadership, not much seems to be happening there.Qlikview won the Marketo Revenue Performance Excellence Award for Global Revenue Performance Excellence. They are also expanding globally very quickly.(Here is the definition of Most Successful Global RPM Execution):Honors an organization with successful Marketo implementations across multiple countries or regions, as well as unprecedented results within those deployments, including increased revenue, marketing ROI, global alignment and overall business impact.)
  3. Qlikview is a modern marketing firm
    They are big into B2B demand generation, including social, content marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, etc. Microstrategy is doing none of those to any degree that I can see.

What do you think? Why do you think savvy young companies damage established players so much? We love comments and those who share.