David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

Alteryx is a data analytics software company that offers data preparation and analytics tools to simplify and automate data wrangling, data cleaning and modeling processes, enabling line-of-business personnel to quickly access, manipulate, analyze and output data. The platform features tools to run a variety of analytic functions such as diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive and geospatial analytics in a unified platform, and can connect to various data warehouses, cloud applications, spreadsheets and other sources.

The Alteryx Analytic Process Automation (APA) Platform offers analytics automation, machine learning (ML) and data science capabilities. With this platform, personnel can share data across teams and automate analytics and data science processes via automation building blocks. The platform also enables building AutoML Models in an automated and assisted manner, enabling personnel to apply various ML methods such as XGBoost, Elastic Net, Random Forest and others.

Alteryx’s APA platform can speed up the data analysis process by converging the capabilities of multiple tools into one platform to provide automated, self-service, end-to-end processing across data access and preparation, analytics and data science. The ability to automate analytics processes is critical for all organizations looking to eliminate errors in manual processes, improve governance and accelerate time to insight. We assert that by 2024, one-third of organizations will adopt an analytic operations approach similar to, and integrated with, their data operations processes to enhance responsiveness and agility.

Alteryx recently rolled out its 2021.3 version, introducing enhancements and features in its platform including a new Compare Workflows that enable line-of-business personnel to compare two workflows and identify the differences in tool IDs, tool types, tool configurations and connections via visual indicators. The Alteryx Intelligence Suite now includes two new Computer Vision tools. The Image Profile tool allows personnel to extract information from images, and the Image Recognition tool can train a ML model to classify images.

Alteryx Designer is a no-code capability that enables line-of-business personnel to create automated data preparation, data blending and analytics workflows. It offers drag-and-drop tools in the Workflow Canvas where personnel can connect and edit properties to build workflows and applications. It includes over 300 automation building blocks and can integrate with 80+ data sources, including spreadsheets, documents, cloud sources, Snowflake, AWS, Azure and RPA bots. It also allows users to create custom tools and formulas for specific needs, and then reuse them with Alteryx SDKs. In the 2021.3 update, Alteryx also launched a new Recommended category in the Designer Tool Palette, which uses ML to automatically provide a list of suggested tools to connect when building new workflows and adding to existing ones.

Earlier this year, Alteryx formed Alteryx Ventures, which is a $50 million fund that will invest in companies with innovative technology and services that complement and expand Alteryx’s analytics and data science products, and further its APA platform. With this initiative, Alteryx is positioning itself to gain exposure to new innovations that can benefit its customer base. In May, Alteryx also introduced limited access to Designer Cloud, a cloud-native data preparation, blending and analytics product it had been working on for quite some time. The company has been slow in bringing its full product line to the cloud, and while additional investments are still needed, these initial steps will be welcomed by its customers and prospects.

I recommend organizations that are seeking to go beyond data ops to automate analytics and data science processes evaluate the capabilities of Alteryx platform.

Regards,

David Menninger