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!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

A learning version of Alteryx to expand Customer Base

Thank you to @LeahK for suggesting that this should be a separate idea (cc @JulieH; @TaraM, @LeahK, @JoeM😞

 

The lack of home use / learning editions of Alteryx is a serious mid-term competitive threat factor for Alteryx - and it's well worth both this Alteryx community; and the Alteryx Community Management team making this a key priority for the Alteryx platform.

 

Rationale:

The BI/Data science space is very competitive (as evidenced by the recent Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrants), and although Alteryx was given very favourable review in some factors - there were serious concerns about licensing costs; and time to productivity.

 

Clearly - Alterxy succeeds in direct proportion to the size of the active user base - so the question is "How do we increase the licensed / deployed user base" and I believe that there are 3 factors which all relate to the issue of learning-edition alteryx licenses.

 

a) Time to productivity:   Right now - I cannot ask one of my staff to learn Alteryx at home and prove their capability before paying several thousand dollars to give them a license.   Once I give them a license; it then takes them 2-3 months to become productive, and we run the lottery of finding out whether this person was a good fit for this kind of role in the first place.   Solution:  Make Alteryx available in a learning edition at home with a robust certification program; and a learning progression built in - that way I can tell my staff "I will give you a license once you demonstrate your competence by learning to this level".   How does this help Alteryx: lower time to productivity = more attractive product

 

b) Size of committed user base:  As tech professionals - we take our tech bias with us to our new role (the "Affinity effect"), and often will have some leverage in tool selection.   The more people know Alteryx and are invested in their Alterxy skill set - the greater this "Affinity effect" will start to show in sales figures.   This also makes the tool more sticky, reducing the defector population if users can see and use latest features at home.

Solution: Give the learning edition away for free - Pentaho spoon is currently free for learning; as is Tableau Public; and MS Power BI is incredibly cheap to learn.   If Alteryx doesn't do this - others definitely will anyway, and this "Affinity Effect" will be washed out.

 

c) Increase the skill pool in the market:  The more wide-spread the skills are - the more likely I am to purchase a toolset.  So - if Alteryx skills are very broadly available in the market - it's easier to make the purchase decision for Alteryx rather than competitors.   However - right now the skillset growth is severely constrained, so Alteryx is making the "Buy Alteryx" decision needlessly harder.   

Solution: Make Alteryx available for training; learning; & Certification for free.   

Note: Although this is directly contrary to my personal interests in the short term (the smaller the number of people with skillX, the higher the market value), it is also long-term selfish because I will be able to increase the impact within my firm by having access to a greater pool of skilled and instantly productive workers in the market.

 

 

Although price may be an issue - this is a separate matter.   I believe that Alteryx can do a lot to create future sales pipeline, and a committed and very sticky user base by providing this home-learning & certification program.   In my mind - this is probably one of the biggest competitive opportunities & threats facing Alteryx right now, given the velocity of this particular industry & segment.

 

I'd be very happy to talk this through in detail with the Alteryx team if that's helpful (just PM me)

Many thanks

Sean

 

 

 

 

9 Comments
ksklar
7 - Meteor

I want this too! Not mentioned by Sean, but also relevant: I think this would really liven up the world of Alteryx blogging! While I'm delighted I can now transfer my license back and forth between computers, I'd be much happier to have a less functional personal license available to use for personal experiments with the program/building things to share with trainees/user groups. I have permission from my current employer to use the license they pay for for personal blogging, but I think that's a relatively unusual situation.

pgensler
8 - Asteroid

Yes, I think this would help tremendously with helping others to get up to speed, similar to Tableau Public, where you can use the product with a limited set of features, but are able to get your hands dirty, and play with it. This would make it incredibly easy to present to others, such as PASS or even SQL Saturday where individuals are most likely wanting to use the product, but are unsure how to get started with it.

Atabarezz
13 - Pulsar

The Cloudshare try live option for 3 hours works perfect for this case...

 

  1. Wish it was longer lasting than 3 hours like a day
  2. Wish it would come with #100 or so different Alteryx challenges...
  3. Wish it included Kaggle datasets
RachelW
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Status changed to: Accepted

Thanks so much for submitting this idea on the Ideas forum and for the responses. The challenges mentioned in this thread are on our radar as we design solutions to help people get up to speed in the Designer faster. 

 

In 2017, we released Alteryx Certification (Designer Core) and Alteryx Academy. I hope these resources have been helpful as people look to get started with the Designer and test their skills. 

 

We're also looking for ways that we can improve the Designer, so that it is easier for people who are new to the Designer to get started and be more productive more quickly, enabling them to determine if the Designer will help them solve problems during the trial period. We have several changes in mind that you'll see over the next year that will help people get started. It won't be a learning version specifically; however, I believe it will address some of the challenges in this tread. 

 

Thanks again for all the comments! 

SeanAdams
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

That is great news @RachelW - I actually had this same discussion with one of our team that is going through our training progression at the moment, and we have several hundred people who would be able to make use of the learning version once available.

 

Additionally - I'd love to use this in recruitment - e.g. "download Alteryx, and do something interesting - and then let's talk about this in your interview"

wale_ilori
9 - Comet

Excited to see this is on the road map!!!

 

One great way to ease adoption and understanding of the tools is to have more comprehensive examples or how to's for the tools in the portfolio. Some of the tools are relatively easy to figure out but others not as much and there are not enough examples to explain how to use them or explain how they were built. Let's bear in mind, many of the interested users would be hard core analysts using excel and other related tools to transform mountains of data that take hours to accomplish.

 

Another area of focus could be the speed Alteryx allows one to determine if an idea is feasible commonly known as proof of concept (POC). This is an approach I have used to gain confidence of executives in the past to show them how valuable Alteryx is in determining if an idea involving large amounts of data is feasible. Even IT folk that atimes balk at using Alteryx could use it to test out scenarios quickly instead of taking weeks to build complicated SQL queries and stored procedures for something only to find that the solution cant be achieved.

 

More video how to's would be especially helpful for macro building because many times its a case of simply selecting a field when configuring that enables the macro to run. the already built macros are sometimes a bit tricky to follow. Having the step by step builds would help immensely.

adrianloong
11 - Bolide

+10!! Totally agree with @SeanAdams 

WillTravelForData
8 - Asteroid

I am having same issue.  I want to increase my Alteryx skills but right now, I can only do by staying late to work.  This can be problematic since I normally take bus from suburbs and the last bus allow lets me study for about 45 minutes.  

 

I propose a free or developer license that limits the number of import rows to a few hundreds rows so that I can do all the great challenges that Alteryx provides as learning tools.

msg2kamran
5 - Atom

I am not well trained so far in Alteryx and trial has got expired. Is there any way to extend the trial of this application?