I sat down with Joshua Burkhow (@JoshuaB), Chief Evangelist at Alteryx, to talk about his career path thus far, what he thinks about the cloud, and what makes him excited for the future of Alteryx and the cloud.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your experience before Alteryx?
A: I joined the US Marines right out of high school, and I did that for almost five years. I got to travel all over the world—it was fantastic. My first introduction to a technical role was what they call a com center operator. (These are the guys who set up communication centers when we deploy somewhere.) It was very surface level, but once I got out, I knew that I had a little bit of a technical mind, but I hadn't explored it fully. So I went towards getting a Bachelor's degree in networking (figuring out how data travels across the network) and then eventually a Master’s in IT and understanding how organizations use data.
That was how I landed a few technical roles that were engineering-oriented, setting up systems. But then I eventually landed a contract at Nike, and once I got into Nike, it was a turning point because I got to see how data operates at a massive company, and that was super interesting and exciting.
Q: What do you do at Alteryx now?
A: My formal title is Chief Evangelist, and I do a handful of different things. I spend the majority of my time with customers, and really it's about making sure that they're clear on what Alteryx is, what it does, how it works, and how it's valuable. And that comes in a whole bunch of different flavors: from sales meetings to presentations to conferences and so on. I also work with the product and spend a lot of time learning the product and figuring out what its strengths are. I have almost 12 years of experience using Alteryx, so I have a perspective on what's cool, what's good, and what customers are telling me they need versus what we're providing. And finally, I try to spend a lot of time with folks to make sure that the word is getting spread—how analytics as an industry and practice is moving and shaking. A little bit of everything!
Q: What keeps you excited as the Chief Evangelist? What is motivating and keeps you going?
A: The nerding out part is always fun 😀 Seeing new exciting capabilities and figuring out how the things that I did ten years ago are literally a click of a button today. I enjoy getting to talk with customers as well. I like connecting with people who share a lot of the same ideas and perspectives and then working to make their lives a little bit better.
I also like the communication aspect—I’m writing a book, I write blog posts, and I’m constantly doing videos and social media content focused on Alteryx. I'm also thinking about the industry of analytics and data science and all this stuff going on with AI too. Asking questions like where this is headed and what we should be paying attention to.
Q: What do you think of Alteryx’s move to the cloud?
A: To be very transparent, I think it couldn't happen fast enough. The narrative of “everyone’s moving to the cloud, we have to be in the cloud” is kind of a foregone conclusion at this point. Everyone is building their platforms for the cloud for lots of good reasons. For Alteryx specifically, there are a couple of things I am really excited about.
As an advanced user of Designer Desktop over the years, we’ve gotten to a point where it’s a Swiss army knife of tools and capabilities inside of a single platform. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that it's super hard to manage that at scale.
If we want to get the power of Alteryx into everybody's hands, we have to move to what we call purpose-built—we take the individual capabilities that we have in Designer Desktop and even Server, and we start to build them out as applications. And that’s really hard to do with on-prem software.
Think about the data prep tools in Designer Desktop. There are lots of tools there already, and we could keep growing and growing them until people are constantly scrolling to find all the tools they need. But now, we could build an app that's on the cloud and available to everybody that is tailored to the data prep tasks so that capability can be implemented more efficiently. We can layer in AI and machine learning concepts into the software so that it’s much smarter and better at accomplishing critical tasks.
And then, when you think about some of Alteryx’s other offerings, especially Auto Insights, those have only been on the cloud. So now we have our own platform (you can think of it like an ecosystem) where all these pieces are able to work together in a strong way to serve customers.
Q: What's the coolest part about the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform for you right now?
A: As a long-time Alteryx user, I’m really excited about the Plans feature of Designer Cloud. It does a couple of things that are quite interesting. The first one is that it allows orchestration. There are other tools out there in the market that allow orchestration, but not within the Alteryx ecosystem/platform. So when we use Designer Desktop and Server, we can schedule stuff, but we don't have a mechanism in place that says once workflow a complete, then complete another workflow. And if that workflow fails, then run a different workflow. We have rockstar users that are trying to build that capability in their workflows, but it’s challenging. But now, with Plans, it’s easier to set up this functionality and be explicit with the workflow orchestration logic.
I love how the cloud is like LEGO bricks. Before, with on-prem, we would give them a kit, and we would say here's your airplane or here's your house. Or here's your McLaren car. You just have to put it together with the tools that you have available.
Where the cloud becomes a little bit more powerful is we have all of those kits put together, so you could now make whatever the heck you want, right? You can start to put all these different LEGO brick sets and pieces together from a wider variety of LEGO bricks. For example, in the future, I'll be able to kick off a cloud workflow, and then I'll push it to some environment like Snowflake, and then I'd be able to pick that data up from a desktop workflow, do some work on it, and then output that to you know, some other environment in the cloud—perhaps an Auto Insights dashboard or a machine learning model. And with up-leveled scheduling capability, you’ll have the ability to construct a whole day of analytics work end-to-end automatically.
Cloud opens up a world of possibilities! (GIF created by @mikecusic)
Q: What’s coming up next for you that you are excited about?
A: Inspire is coming up, and this year is going to be particularly amazing—I mean, it's in Vegas! We’ve got new ACEs coming on board, and I’m not going to reveal any secrets yet, but I am super excited for them. I look back to becoming an Alteryx ACE, and it was such a defining point for me.
I personally have some stage time and a couple of talks that I'll be giving with amazing friends like Nicole Johnson (@NicoleJ), Chris Goodman (@cgoodman3), and my incredible leader Corey Spencer (@CoreySpencerAYX). There's a lot of new stuff coming out that's exciting, and there'll be a lot of learning opportunities. This is my 6th or 7th year going to Inspire, and so most importantly, I get to see all the friends that I haven't gotten to go see yet—and for me, Analytics has always been about people and my personal mission to impact the world using data to discover new and exciting things!
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