Qlik > Case Studies > McAfee better protects its business and its customers using QlikView

McAfee better protects its business and its customers using QlikView

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Country

United States

Product

QlikView
Star Integration Server
Star Command Center Plug-in Task Pack for QlikView

Tech Stack

Oracle Hyperion
MicroStrategy
SAP

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization
Predictive Quality Analytics

Services

System Integration
Data Science Services

About The Customer

McAfee is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company with over 125 million users in 120 countries around the world. The company’s mission is to protect consumers and businesses of all sizes from the latest malware and emerging online threats. According to McAfee’s VP of Financial Planning & Analysis, Jeff Brobst, malware threats are growing exponentially. “With the world being as interconnected as it is, the risks to security are greater than ever,” he says. “The security industry is always evolving and McAfee continues to stay as dynamic as possible to keep up. We have one goal and purpose, and that is to keep the world safe.” With its global research for real-time threat intelligence, integrated solutions and services, compliance processes built into solutions, and single management platform for optimized security, McAfee is doing just that.

The Challenge

McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, was facing challenges around its financial reporting and operational processes. The company found that its Business Intelligence (BI) solutions were limited and employees were unable to aggregate reports in an efficient way. In fact, approximately 50 percent of the finance group spent 50 percent of their time gathering reports, which left very little time to analyze the data and make the appropriate business decisions. Only select employees were actually able to access, view and analyze forecast, bookings and renewals data, which prevented upper management from receiving timely and accurate business insights. Additionally, these challenges greatly increased IT dependency. McAfee needed a BI tool that could standardize reporting, reduce the amount of manual work required to aggregate reports, increase data visibility and empower business users from all over the company to pull reports with little to no IT involvement.

The Solution

McAfee conducted a performance audit with various BI solutions and found that QlikView®, an industry leading Business DiscoveryTM – user-driven BI – platform stood out from the pack because of its ease of development and simple user interface. The company’s data needed to be pulled from existing SAP, Oracle Hyperion and MicroStrategy applications and therefore it needed a solution that could access all the data and pull it into QlikView without any disruption. McAfee brought in Star Analytics, a Qlik® partner and software development company with a focus on automation and application integration across hybrid computing environments. With unique expertise in BI automation and integration, Star Analytics’ Star Integration Server is a data bridge that extracts data, metadata and security from Oracle Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Financial Management and Oracle Hyperion Planning applications in an open and standards-based format. The Star Integration Server pulled data in a format that is easily consumable by QlikView and delivered it in a format that ensures components are accurately rendered in QlikView. Star Integration Server also preserved “time” and “accounting” intelligence and other application logic. Additionally, The Star Command Center Plug-in Task Pack for QlikView provided self-service automation for end-users and real-time refreshes, ensuring the accuracy and integrity of Oracle Hyperion source data flowing into QlikView.

Operational Impact

Processes that used to take the company three weeks, including the ”closing” process, used with large deals such as the Intel acquisition, was reduced dramatically to just three days.
Users were able to pull reports quickly and efficiently from various data sources and the company was finally able to streamline its reporting.
QlikView was then rolled out to key individuals in sales and upper management and operational processes improved dramatically.
For example, prior to QlikView, the company was never able to track employees’ compliance with travel and entertainment processes. Now, they are able to track when employees book their travel and know who is not complying with a company “seven days in advance” policy.
From a sales perspective, team members can now pull real-time data which enables them to sell McAfee products to customers at appropriate and competitive costs.

Quantitative Benefit