Radnor's Qlik Technologies shares up 28% after IPO

Shares of Qlik Technologies Inc., a Radnor business-software company, soared 28 percent Friday after their initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock market.

Morgan Stanley and other brokers sold 11.2 million shares at $10, beating Qlik's estimate of about $9.

The stock closed at $12.80, setting a value for the company's total 84 million shares - most of which aren't traded - at well above $1 billion.

"Very, very exciting," Qlik chief executive Lars Bjork said in an interview during the day as the shares rose.

Qlik sells a "business intelligence" system, QlikView, which, like SAP AG's Business Objects, IBM's Cognos, and Microsoft's SharePoint, is designed to pull together data about customers from disparate databases to help analysts, salespeople, and bosses sell and service the clients easily, from handheld smart phones as well as PC workstations.

"The new decision-makers won't stand in an office behind a screen," Bjork said. "They will stand in the streets, and make decisions there."

Bjork said Qlik's "associative software" differed from rivals because "it enables the user [to be] in control of the software. You are not dependent on your IT department at all times to pre-calculate your reports."

With 600 people at 25 offices in 15 countries, including nearly 50 at its Radnor Chester Road headquarters, Qlik said sales topped $157 million last year, up from $118 million a year earlier, to clients the company says include Campbell Soup Co., Colonial Life Insurance, Qualcomm Inc., and Britain's National Health Service, among many others.

Most Qlik staffers work in Sweden and other countries outside the United States. Bjork was educated as an engineer and formerly worked for midsize tech companies in Sweden.

He moved with his family to Berwyn from Sweden four years ago.

"We are founded in Sweden [in 1993], and we still have our R&D back there. But we decided to relocate our headquarters to the U.S.," Bjork said.

"We couldn't do the West Coast; it's a nine-hour time difference" to Sweden. "We found the Philadelphia area to have a good mix of talent, logistics to Europe, you can easily reach the major airport, and [there are] a lot of customers that you can get to in the major [Northeast] cities within two hours."

Another factor was that two early Qlik backers, former SAP AG executives Paul Wahl and Alexander Ott, were based near SAP's Newtown Square headquarters at the time. Wahl has since moved home to Germany.

Besides investing, they invited Bjork to move Qlik near their homes, and they helped oversee its entry into the business-software market.

A question now is whether Qlik will try to bulk up like its business-software rivals, or sell out to a bigger company.

"I hope we don't become the next SAP or Oracle," said Bjork, though he added he would be happy to hire Business Object veterans who might not want to stay at SAP.

"We are going after a huge market that will expand," he said.

Major investors include Accel Partners, Erel Margalit's Jerusalem Venture Partners, and insiders and directors including Ott and Wahl.