Inside Qlik’s Battle for PMI and Amadeus

Tessa Morgan

Welcome to the show! I'm Tessa Morgan. Today, we're taking you behind the closed doors of a high-stakes enterprise software battleground. Imagine you've spent eighteen months cultivating a major technical champion at a massive global company, only for them to vanish overnight, leaving your multi-million dollar software completely unused. It's the ultimate enterprise nightmare, and it's exactly what played out in a leaked June 2026 Q200 strategic review for Qlik.

Tessa Morgan

Let's start with Philip Morris International, or PMI. They're going through a massive corporate pivot -- forty-two percent of their 2025 revenue came from smoke-free products. That is a logistical mountain to climb, rebuilding their supply chain from scratch. Qlik's account manager, an eleven-year veteran named Ulrich, secured a twelve-month renewal. But right after signing, the telemetry showed usage dropped off a cliff. Why? Because PMI's IT service hubs in Krakow and Singapore are outsourced to IBM, where staff rotate out every twenty-two months. Ulrich's main champion was gone, replaced by a ghost town.

Tessa Morgan

The immediate action item on Ulrich's plate? He has to hunt down and secure an in-person meeting with the new business sponsor successor at PMI, and find out who actually owns the Snowflake budget. But he's also fighting a monster. Microsoft is sitting heavy on this account with thirty-five thousand active Power BI users. So how does Qlik fight back? Well, the internal strategy review reveals a beautiful tactical play. Rob Heather is stepping in to run a demo of an automated Tableau-to-Qlik migration tool. They aren't trying to tear down Power BI directly; they're trying to scoop up the forty-five percent of legacy workloads still sitting on Tableau and SAP.

Tessa Morgan

And the secret weapon to bypass the whole "Power BI is easier to use" argument? It's Qlik's conversational AI layer, known internally as MCP, or Answers. Instead of building complex dashboards, users can just type a question like, "where are the supply chain bottlenecks for smoke-free products in Germany?" It completely sidesteps the visualization monopoly by making the dashboard itself obsolete.

Tessa Morgan

Now, if you think the Philip Morris situation is intense, let's look at Amadeus, the digital backbone of the travel industry. Over two billion passengers boarded flights using their systems in 2025. Qlik's account manager here is David, a thirty-nine-year tech veteran. On paper, David is winning. He's got a perfect relationship score of one hundred, and they are tripling the user base from twenty-five hundred to eighty-five hundred users. But there's a catch.

Tessa Morgan

Amadeus is moving to a centralized purchasing model. Suddenly, individual department budgets are gone, and a corporate committee is looking to consolidate. Standing right next to Qlik on the spreadsheet is Microsoft, holding a massive twenty-five million euro global framework agreement. To make matters worse, Qlik has a severe professional services gap in Spain. Local integrators charge four hundred to five hundred euros a day, while Qlik's global consultants cost twelve hundred. That's a massive premium that is actively damaging trust.

Tessa Morgan

So David has a strict three-month tactical action plan to fix this. First, they have to resolve the red-flag relationship with professional services in Spain. Second, they need to validate a real business case for data governance. But to do that, they first have to play detective: they have to identify Amadeus's actual preference between big data-governance providers like Informatica and Collibra, rather than guessing.

Tessa Morgan

Finally, they are shifting the narrative from basic charts to AI readiness. David is organizing a technical whiteboard session on AI, led by pre-sales lead Raul Andres. The goal is to define three priority use cases with measurable economic impact, showing how Qlik can serve as the clean, governed data foundation for Amadeus's AI ambitions. Because if you are the concrete slab the AI is built on, procurement can't easily rip you out.

Tessa Morgan

It makes you realize that at this level, enterprise software isn't won by who has the prettiest charts. It's won by who manages the human friction of IT turnovers and high consulting rates. As we move to a world where AI interfaces hide the underlying software entirely... it leaves you wondering: when the user only ever sees the chatbot, will anyone actually care who owns the database underneath? Something to think about. Thanks for listening to this quick take, and we'll see you next time.