Buckle Up Your Boots And Ski With Purpose!

How do you get to go skiing in Texas in the middle of May? Come to Qonnections 2019 of course!

Lindsey Vonn, the most successful female alpine skier in history, became guest speaker at this year's Qonnections. In celebration, Qlik has teamed up with SkyTechSport, the leading Ski & Snowboard professional training simulator company, to change the game with ski analytics built into the ultra-realistic ski simulators that provide an all year-round skiing experience used by professionals, and those in training - around the world, including the U.S. Ski Team.

During Qonnections 2019, everyone could to buckle up their ski boots and track their performance on a virtual downhill slalom ski course, painstakingly modelled from the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.

The ski simulator uses real ski boots and has advanced sensors to measure metrics such as speed and edging angles, and more! Qlik captured all types of race data during the ski sessions and surfaced the results in a slick Qlik Sense app, built using Qlik Core in a containerised microservices environment, providing real time race analysis, and post-finish line round up, including a leader board to see how you rank in the ski race challenge. We analysed the results of those who participate and measured the key Ski Performance Indicators (SPIs) – including metrics such as number of gates passed, speed, distance and errors made – and more! It's analytics to the edge - literally, the ski edge!

Qlik let visitors ‘Snow’ their results and see how they compare against fellow competitors. Can you can beat the U.S. Ski team’s aggregated training times, or would it be more fun to race against our executive team?

Most importantly, we were raising money and awareness together for the Special Olympics -- a charity that is changing the lives of people with physical and intellectual disabilities all around the world providing a year round opportunity for them to train and compete in over 170 countries, including local, national and regional competitions with over 100,000 events a year. Qlik donated funds to this organization based on every gate a racer passes and the total distance skied.