Qlik Technologies Inc. is following the competition into the public cloud with a new managed implementation of its widely-used visual analytics platform that promises to make data insights more accessible. The service is designed to complement, rather than replace, existing on-premise installations of its software.

Analysts can leverage the hosted functionality to publish graphs created in the desktop version, which has also been updated as part of the launch with new collaboration and aggregation capabilities, online for their peers to view on-demand. In that sense, Qlik Cloud fills the same role as the rival service from Tableau Software Inc., but it doesn’t stop at merely leveling the playing field.

The platform also includes a catalog of third-party information sources that the company obtained through its acquisition of DataMarket Inc. last October. The portal provides users with access to what is touted as a wide variety of free and commercial metrics that can be tapped directly from the on-premise edition of Qlik.

The firm claims that such ready access to data generated outside the organization enables analysts to corroborate internal findings gleaned to a degree that wasn’t always feasible before and enrich visualizations with more details in the process. The resulting reports can be distributed not only through Qlik Cloud but also via a new embedded version introduced in conjunction that allows companies to make the results accessible from their own internally-developed services.

Like the collaboration component, the addition targets mainly Tableau, which has offered the ability to display graphs created using its software in applications and sites for quite some time now. Qlik company is taking the concept a step further than its rival and providing the ability for developers to access the core analytic capabilities of its software on top of that, which extends the usefulness of the service to advanced use cases involving enabling end-users to analyze data on their own.

That functionality will also help Qlik compete more effectively against other business intelligence providers with embedded analytics features, most notably Jaspersoft, which became part of TIBCO Corp. last year in a $185 million transaction. But the company’s edge may not last very long seeing that Tableau now has a particularly strong incentive to expand its own capabilities in that area, which is set to make the already fierce rivalrly of the data visualization world even more intense than it is now.