Analytics
News, events, thought leadership and more.
One of my favorite things at Inspire has always been talking to the data analysts and business leaders who have transformed their analytical decision-making with Alteryx. As much as Inspire is a celebration about them; we are also mindful of the 260 million data workers who are disenfranchised with yesterday's analytical stack. We know there will be ½ billion data workers by 2018, and our mission is to serve them with the best data analytics experience imaginable.
That was the core message of my keynote presentation today, "Analytics. For the People." I opened my keynote with some detail on how the 2014 BI and Analytics market was worth $14B and growing at double digit growth rates. While Alteryx is witness to this incredible growth, most of the analytics software hasn't kept up. We are in the midst of a generational shift in enterprise computing where analysts around the world have issued a declaration of Analytic Independence from the standard tools that can barely answer basic business questions. Today they benefit from agile tools like Alteryx that make them more productive, and able to answer more contemporary questions by blending a variety of analytical data sources together.
Discussing analytics for the people – past, present and future – and with Boston as the backdrop, I wanted keynote attendees to consider how analytics could have been used against the sons and daughters of the American Revolution. There is a well-known blog by Kieran Healy postulating the 'what-if' of the Redcoats having access to the analytics tools we have today. Essentially, the Redcoats could have used metadata to analyze the network of people conversing about a revolution across the 13 colonies, and easily identified Paul Revere as the central figure long before his famous Midnight Ride in 1775. During my keynote I re-enacted Healy's analysis, and demonstrated the power of visual analytics using a (forthcoming) Network Analysis tool in Alteryx.
Turning our attention to the analytics present, I walked everyone through the three evolutionary stages of analytics as defined by Thomas Davenport. Clearly the era of data-enriched offerings has arrived, with Analytics 3.0 being applied not only to a company's operations, but also to its offerings to embed data smartness into the products and services they sell. That's why data workers are wrestling with 8-10 zettabytes of data being created this year alone – more data than what was created in the previous 5000 years of civilization to date!
A significant portion of that new data is being generated by the personal devices (cell phones, fitness monitors, etc.) that we use across our work and personal lives. The Quantified Self movement is well on its way as we are much more cognizant of our own health information, our personal preferences, and our behavioral characteristics thanks to analytics. During my keynote I highlighted examples where Alteryx is playing a significant role in sports analytics and personal music analytics (both use cases were presented in detail this afternoon during breakout sessions with Accenture and The Information Lab respectively).
We're entering a moment where the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming larger than the Internet as we knew it. Sensors, devices and other low latency streams are all immense sources of data, and having an analytics platform that can handle the volume, variety, and velocity of IoT data is critical. McKinsey & Company is doing groundbreaking work with their clients in IoT, and I was honored to have Mark Patel, Partner at McKinsey & Company, participate in the keynote. Mark talked about how many of their clients are collecting significant amounts of IoT data, but the key difference between simply having IoT data and being able to spot the important trends is analytics. I couldn’t agree more.
During the next portion of my keynote, Jimmy Garrett and I walked the audience through our plans we have for the next release of Alteryx, including enhancements to accelerate productivity for new users, while also putting smarter tools into the hands of our power users. More details on these capabilities will be revealed in the coming months, and attendees were treated to a demonstration of some of these new features.
In the "Big Data. For the People." section that followed, I discussed the major changes that have taken place in the Hadoop landscape as data lakes have become the central repository for more and more information. Alteryx has had strong support for the emerging Hadoop stack since 2011, but we never viewed Hadoop as a general purpose compute platform because MapReduce is a fundamentally flawed architecture for analytical work. It was my pleasure to welcome Ion Stoica, CEO at Databricks, to the stage to discuss the emergence of Spark as a more modern experience for a variety of workloads to be processed at petabyte scale. We've been busy embracing Spark, including support for SparkSQL and being the directed committers to SparkR – a fundamental step forward toward delivering R execution closest to where the data resides.
My final section was called "Visual Analytics. For the People." – recognition that the visual analytics movement has allowed users to become closer to their data than ever before. The two Alteryx partners at the forefront of this movement are Qlik and Tableau, and we were recently recognized as the Technology Partner of the Year by Qlik Software. Our relationship with Tableau Software is even longer and more established, and I'm proud to say that we now have over 300 joint Alteryx and Tableau customers around the world. Andrew Beers, VP of Product Development at Tableau Software, joined me on stage to discuss why so many customers are embracing the model of using Alteryx for data blending and advanced analytics plus Tableau for data discovery and visualization.
As Inspire 2015 draws to a close, I want to thank all the sponsors and Alteryx associates who helped make Inspire 2015 the best and most attended conference in company history. But most of all I want to thank over 900 attendees who dedicated 3+ days this week to celebrate their Analytic Independence and the best data analytics platform to blend, prep, model and consume analytical content!
