Qlik, one of the industry’s top makers of business intelligence software, today said that it has filed confidentially for an initial public offering.

The move puts Qlik, officially QlikTech International AB, on a path to return to public markets about five years after being taken private by Thoma Bravo. Before the acquisition, the software maker traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Founded in 1993, Qlik provides cloud-based data management and analytics tools that are used by more than 50,000 organizations worldwide. The company’s best known product is Qlik Sense. It’s a business intelligence platform that enables workers to turn data into visualizations and find useful insights.

One of Qlik Sense’s flagship features is a technology known as the Associative Engine. When a user runs an analysis on a dataset, the technology can automatically surface other records that may be useful for the project. For example, if a business analyst is examining why a particular product is experiencing stronger than expected demand, the Associative Engine can identify other products that are also exceeding sales forecasts. 

Before a company can turn its business data into visualizations, numerous preparatory steps must be taken. The data has to be retrieved from the systems where it’s usually stored and organized for easy processing. Workers also have to remove duplicate entries, as well as carry out a range of technical tasks before the information can be analyzed. Qlik simplifies such tasks with Qlik Data Integration, its other flagship product besides Qlik Sense.

Qlik posted revenue of $180.6 million in its earnings report for the second fiscal quarter of 2016, shortly before its acquisition by Thoma Bravo was announced. Thoma Bravo paid about $3 billion to buy the company. It’s possible that the private equity firm will target a higher valuation than $3 billion for Qlik in its upcoming IPO.

Since the 2016 acquisition, Qlik has shifted from selling perpetual software licenses to a software-as-a-service business model. CRN reported last July that the company had “recently completed” its shift to selling software-as-a-service subscriptions. This may be a factor behind Qlik’s  decision to file for an IPO now rather than earlier. Investors favor software companies with subscription-driven recurring revenue, a factor that could help lift Qlik’s IPO valuation and thus help Thoma Bravo realize a bigger return on its investment.

Since going private in 2016, Qlik has also expanded its feature set through a series of startup acquisitions. The company’s most recent acquisition was in September, when it purchased a startup with a platform for building custom machine learning models. Thanks to the technologies that Qlik obtained over the years, the company has a presence in more parts of the analytics landscape than it did in 2016, a factor that could potentially boost its IPO prospects. 

Thoma Bravo has had success with acquiring enterprise software companies and later taking them public. The private equity firm took this route with Dynatrace Inc., a Boston-based application monitoring provider. Dynatrace went public in 2019 by selling $570 million worth of shares for $16 apiece and is  now trading at over $54 per share.

Like Qlik, Dynatrace shifted its business focus to selling subscription-based solutions before going public.

The capital that Qlik is set to through its IPO could enable the company to create more competition for its rivals in the analytics and data integration segments. Qlik is the second major privately held analytics provider to have indicated recently that it plans to list its shares. Previously, SAS Institute Inc. last July announced plans to go public in 2024.

Image: Qlik