How is your business benefiting from Alteryx Server License

Question

Hello all, Our company is evaluating an investment into an Alteryx License. Curious to know how folks/companies out there using/benefiting from Alteryx Server license? For example: 1. Do u have internal users or have external customers accessing your workflows in the gallery ? 2. Do u schedule jobs/workflows. Has that been helpful? 3. What other use cases are out there? We are new to server license and trying to assess its benefits, strengths and weakness. Thanks for your help.

CiaranA · Answer

As for weaknesses, my biggest complaint is that the server does not allow for easy interactivity with various questions. For example, if you want the user to choose a state and then choose a city within that state, there is no easy way to do this in the gallery today.  I can't have my city list update live based upon the state that the user selects. There are "workarounds", but they are clunky and less intuitive. This has prevented us from transitioning some work out of excel/access because those products allow for better user interfaces that are interactive (ie one dropdown/listbox is driving another one.)

I had this same issue but chaining apps together solved this, bit long winded in the build phase but great once finished. All the user experiences is a click next button in between the two apps so it feels like one app to user.

patrick_digan · Answer

@IKS I would second everything that @CiaranA mentioned. We started with a couple alteryx designer licenses in 2007, and we took a leap of faith in 2015 and acquired an alteryx server license to go with our 20+ Designer licenses. We've been tremendously happy with the decision. We get a lot of benefit from:

1) scheduling: We have a number of jobs that ran after hours each night. We run reports, email reports, cache large data sets, etc. With a few clicks you can take a process and have it run automatically at any specified interval.

2) Gallery: Our entire company can go to our Alteryx Server website and consume workflows that we the designers create. It allows for interactivity where the end user can specify a state, region, business segment code, year etc. The end user would then get some sort of response back, whether it be a formatted pdf, excel file, email. This has been the biggest benefit for our team.

3) API: because the alteryx server is accessible via a REST API, we've been able to integrate it into other existing operations. For example, we've built out some VBA code to access the Alteryx API so existing excel files can now send/retrieve data with the Alteryx Server doing most of the work. We process thousands of API requests a day from a number of API processes that we've built out. It's my understanding that some of the java/javascript coding on the other end was time consuming, but the alteryx side was really easy to setup a workflow and make it available via the API.

As for weaknesses, my biggest complaint is that the server does not allow for easy interactivity with various questions. For example, if you want the user to choose a state and then choose a city within that state, there is no easy way to do this in the gallery today.  I can't have my city list update live based upon the state that the user selects. There are "workarounds", but they are clunky and less intuitive. This has prevented us from transitioning some work out of excel/access because those products allow for better user interfaces that are interactive (ie one dropdown/listbox is driving another one.)

CiaranA · Answer

@IKS I've had experience using Server in my previous role and now in my new role at varying scales.

In both cases we used / are using Alteryx Server to service internal business users only but in previous role we were considering opening up certain apps to a customer.

The best example in my previous role to illustrate the benefits of Alteryx Server was where we had a whole Team regularly running queries of our main dataset where the parameters would change each request. We were able to build apps that allowed the end consumers in this Team (who were all non-Alteryx users), to query this data set repeatedly with different queries each time. This effectively removed the need for this team to repeatedly ask my Team to run this task, removing around 4 requests a day which consisted of around 3-5 emails each.

In terms of scheduling, this is one of the most useful things the Server can facilitate. Any task which needs repeating can be scheduled to run at a specified interval. A good example here is a daily workflow which takes 15mins to run feeds a critical reporting Tableau dashboard. This used to be run by a team member every morning, scheduling meant removed the dependency in this team member completely.

Another key benefit I've recognised with Server is how by sharing workflows, you can encourage and foster best practice around building efficient workflows and have a clear version control process for production ready workflows.

Hopefully some useful thoughts.

Ciaran