Alteryx Analytics 2018.4 – A fresh new modern look

[AshleyK]

It's that time of year where we start to reflect on the past and plan for the future. While we are focusing on driving innovations for next year, it's important to look back across our busy year here at Alteryx. In case you missed any of our announcements this year...

• To continue to help solve the first mile of analytics challenge of discovering and cataloging your data and assets, we added over a dozen metadata loaders in Alteryx Connect, continued driving integration within the Alteryx platform, made deployment faster and added asset recommendations to help you get to that next question and answer.
• In Alteryx Designer, the cornerstone of our end-to-end modern analytics platform, we added Visualytics to allow you to visualize your data in an interactive way along your workflow and also added the ability to publish an interactive dashboard to Server Gallery to share insights with others.  Other exciting features include: standing ovation worthy caching functionality to speed your time to insights; 3 new code-friendly tools including Apache Spark, Deploy, and Python tools which increase collaboration between data scientists and analysts to leverage powerful code across workflows and models; over a dozen new data connectors; 3 new languages; and enhancements like one-click tool alignment to make your analytics process easier at every step.
• To more easily scale and share your analytics, you can now give each job on Alteryx Server a priority level to ensure the critical answers are delivered first and dedicate a specific node for workers which meets your growing geographical needs. Also, with high availability (HA) and SAML SSO Auth for Gallery, your enterprise can share insights seamlessly and securely.
• Finally, we introduced Alteryx Promote to empower data scientists to solve the last mile challenge in analytics, to help operationalize their models, and continue to integrate Promote across the platform as well as including built-in Visualytics to give immediate insight into the health of models.

If that's not enough to make you upgrade immediately, we've got more in store for you. With 2018.4, we enable you to connect to even more data, expand our global capabilities and bring to you a fresh new modern look for the modern end-to-end analytics platform.

Fresh new modern look

One thing I never tire of hearing about is how much everyone loves that Alteryx empowers them to do things they once thought were impossible. We've focused on adding the functionality needed to drive the modern end-to-end analytics platform to be indispensable to your analytics journey, and in this release we are proud to bring you a fresh new look in Designer so that it looks as powerful as it feels. You'll notice when you open Designer that there is a new splash screen as well as an overall modern look with a dark blue reskin, slick new icons and a new modern font. We've made it easier to use by moving key functionality closer to the canvas where you are working. The 'Run' button is now big, blue and inline with newly relocated 'schedule workflow' and 'run as analytic app' buttons. Easily zoom in and out of the canvas to navigate those mile-long workflows with ease and start a new workflow just like you would in your internet browser.

Besides updating Designer, we also gave the Server admin homepage a face lift with a new dashboard. Upon login, admins can immediately see vital diagnostic and usage information such as the number of users and connected worker machines. You can now easily understand how your cluster is configured and identify constraints in resources that can impact performance.

Connect to more data, easier

The amount of data you need to analyze from different sources will only continue to surge as evidenced by nearly 50,000 Instagram posts, over 73,000 online transactions, and over 3 million GB of internet data generated every minute of every day. At Alteryx, we know you need to connect to all of this data so we continue to make it easier for you to reach every data source to make critical data-driven decisions. Starting at the first mile of analytics in Alteryx Connect, there is a new PostgreSQL metadata loader. Within Designer, we now support .gzip as an input data source and you can now use conditional SQL statements with the Write Data In-DB tool. For our code-friendly data scientists out there, you can use the Python Tool to bring in your Python Jupyter notebooks that were written outside of Alteryx to leverage existing code to help support the analysts in your organization. To speed up the deployment of your predictive models, data scientists can now import custom R and Python packages from private remote repositories using Promote. 

Continuing to expand globally

At Alteryx, we are excited to make it easier for analysts and data scientists around the globe to experience the thrill of solving. With this release, we are expanding our linguistic capabilities by localizing Designer in Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish to join our ever-growing list including French, German and Japanese. Simply choose which language you want when you install 2018.4 and navigate Designer fully in Portuguese or Spanish. Besides expanding our product capabilities, we are also offering more robust website support in French and German so you can find what you are looking for in the language you feel most comfortable. Additionally, you can expand your own data analytics capabilities with your colleagues via the new French Community site in beta, with more languages to follow soon.

While these are just the highlights of the exciting new features in Alteryx Analytics 2018.4, I encourage you to look at more in-depth details about these features including our deep dive into the new look and updated technical documentation.

We hope you are excited about the new offerings in Alteryx Analytics 2018.4. For existing customers, you can experience the breadth of our new offering by upgrading to our latest release. There is plenty more coming and we welcome you to participate in our beta program and help shape our next release.

For those exploring the Alteryx platform, take our latest build for a test drive with our free trial and see for yourself why thousands of analysts choose Alteryx to tackle their biggest analytic challenges.