Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Analytics

News, events, thought leadership and more.
HakanS
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

"We need to scale our analytics capability." What’s your first thought? Is it regarding “computer scale,” i.e. clock cycles, network pipes, and data volumes? Perhaps it’s about the number of users engaged in your analytics process - data scientists, developers, IT staff, business analysts, etc. A third thought, which you may not think of immediately, may hover around the myriad of use cases that are waiting to be analyzed, from optimizing the supply chain to analyzing IoT log data, to prioritizing the sales funnel, to the HR department’s attrition analysis, and the list goes on. Clearly, there are several components that must be considered. Below, I’ll share solutions for addressing the three common topics enterprises must consider when scaling their analytics.

 

Scale compute and data stores with Databricks

The growing trend for scaling compute and storage environments for massive analytical performance is to leverage elastic cloud resources. While the trend has been going on for some time, many enterprises have learned that the cloud, on its own, isn't a silver bullet. The real simplicity and power of the cloud is more effectively harnessed in a managed cluster like Databricks, providing the performance and scalability expected from a platform for advanced analytics. The Databricks Unified Analytics Platform provides not just the fastest implementation of Apache Spark, but it also has an instant startup, so business analysts don’t need to be reliant on DevOps teams to setup Apache Spark. Databricks also provides auto-scaling, which ensures your biggest analytics jobs scale up when needed, and scale down when not in use, reducing TCO.

 

Scale analytical professionals with Alteryx

We've all heard it before - there aren't enough data scientists to address the needs of all businesses. The solution being put forward is to recruit the business analysts to the problem-solving process.  This requires a new generation of technology that empowers these traditionally non-technical users to accomplish more, both on their own, and in collaboration with data scientists. Hence, Alteryx! That one was easy.

 

Scale Data Scientists with Alteryx + Databricks

As data scientists create analytics models, they can’t provide an easy way for business analysts to reuse those models. By embedding that code into the easy, drag-and-drop Alteryx UI, business analysts can configure and reuse the models for different datasets and use cases without having to engage data scientists for every change, reducing the load on these valuable resources

 

Enable business analysts to run analytics at massive scale

Simply empowering more users to solve a small number of data problems doesn’t make an organization data-driven. However, allowing data professionals, who are armed with modern analytical platforms like Alteryx and Databricks, to address the many departmental uses cases that are waiting to be explored can make a huge difference in moving the organization to become smarter, faster and more agile when it comes to making data-driven decisions. The managed Databricks platform and the ease of use of Alteryx combines to make analytics scalable, quick to implement, and provides a short route to analytical success. The integration between the two platforms is what’s key. With Alteryx, all your data workers can tap into the power of Databricks by simply pointing to the Databricks platform with the Databricks connecter inside of Alteryx to run your highest scale analytics jobs. The near limitless analytic use-case possibilities that Alteryx Designer can handle when coupled with the power of Databricks is what makes this technology combination so impactful to achieving analytics at scale.

 

Experience the power of Alteryx + Databricks for yourself in our latest release, Existing customers can upgrade to the latest version, or if you’re not yet a customer, you can get hands on by downloading our free trial. Also, be sure to get a free 14 day trial of the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform to instantly implement  the integration of Alteryx and Databricks  With this release, Alteryx builds upon our existing functionality with Databricks by bringing the power of Apache Spark to the masses via our new in-database analytic connector for Databricks on AWS.  Learn more about this, and all other newly announced Alteryx features by registering for our 2018.2 launch webinar.

Håkan Söderbom
Director, Technology Alliances

Håkan builds strategic alliances and partner ecosystems, helping tie together technologies to make software solve real problems for real users. With a background in the computer sciences he started his career as a software developer and as he progressed into management and leadership he also transferred around the world. He currently lives in Seattle, working with software platform companies across the world.

Håkan builds strategic alliances and partner ecosystems, helping tie together technologies to make software solve real problems for real users. With a background in the computer sciences he started his career as a software developer and as he progressed into management and leadership he also transferred around the world. He currently lives in Seattle, working with software platform companies across the world.