Many people in project management think of Microsoft Excel as an inferior tool. They worry about version control with collaboration across the business, especially when dealing with large enterprise projects. However, Excel can be a powerful project management tool when used with the right add-ins. When you understand the unique challenges of enterprise projects and how Excel can serve those needs, you can learn to use it wisely.

Business intelligence (BI) dashboards contain a wealth of information that companies need to succeed in competitive environments. Marketing and sales departments might rely on pipeline progression dashboards while product managers and engineering teams use them to track product usage and performance KPIs.

Security standards continue to evolve, and organizations need infrastructure that evolves along with them. TLS 1.3 brings stronger encryption to streaming infrastructure for data in transit while ensuring alignment with strict security and compliance requirements. We’re excited to announce that TLS 1.3 is currently available as an opt-in feature on Confluent Cloud Dedicated clusters and all other Confluent Cloud APIs, including Stream Governance, Metrics, and Control Plane.

As leaders across industries, we’ve all experienced the frustration of legacy BI tools—spending weeks building dashboards that end up unused, or struggling with rigid filters that block true exploration and insight. Calling this “data-driven” is no longer acceptable! Today, the pace of AI innovation has raised expectations. Customers and end users now demand instant, contextual, and explainable intelligence, seamlessly embedded into their daily workflows.

Being effective is not just about output. It describes how a team works together to deliver results that actually matter. At Databox, we define effective teams as ones that are clear on expectations, aligned on goals, and confident in how their work connects to the bigger picture. Sounds good in theory, right? But how do we actually achieve it?

A few months ago, at Qlik Connect, we announced the launch of Qlik Open Lakehouse, a new, fully managed capability that brings together the best of the Upsolver platform together with Qlik Talend Cloud. And today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Qlik Open Lakehouse within Qlik Talend Cloud that makes it easy and cost-effective for organizations to ingest, optimize, and manage massive amounts of data directly in Apache Iceberg–based lakehouses.

IT Professionals Day is our opportunity to celebrate the people who keep the digital world running - the ones who make sure data is secure, reliable, and ready to power innovation. At Qlik, we know IT professionals aren’t just solving problems, they’re enabling possibilities.