Donald Farmer, VP innovation and design at visual analytics software firm Qlik explains the evolving demands of the analytics market today, and how his firm is tackling the challenge of combining data management, analytic capabilities and visualisation.

Another major element of Qlik's strategy is giving business users the ability to easily share, work together on and tell stories about data.

In recent years there's been a wave of hype around data scientists and the need for specialist skills, but Farmer argues the real value comes from putting analytics into the hands of those who understand the business- it's about finding the right balance.

On the problem of 'data lakes', Farmer thinks that many businesses need to concentrate on getting basic business value out of the huge volumes of wasted data they are already sitting on, before moving on to more advanced techniques.

So how does the average business user get to work on tapping this goldmine? Farmer's answer to this is 'natural analytics' – a method of exploring big data that uses the techniques that already come naturally to us.