Alteryx, Hadoop, and the Emergence of the Data Analyst

[BrianD]

As we head into Strata + Hadoop World this week, it’s an excellent time to take stock of the ways Alteryx is working with our customers that will be at the event.

Powering Hadoop Analytics

Our customers are connecting the analytic and data blending powers of Alteryx to Hadoop in lots of ways, but Impala and Spark are where the real growth is. Alteryx has worked with Impala for over a year, but with version 10.0 dropping earlier this month, Alteryx provides a front end that translates business users’ intentions to SQL commands that Impala (and now Spark) can execute in your Hadoop instance. You can use the full power of your Hadoop investment to blend and cleanse your data, import outside sources, and shape your data for exactly the analysis you need to do. And with the Alteryx investment in Spark and particularly SparkR, business users can use the drag and drop interface of Alteryx to create predictive analytics models that can run on huge datasets. Customers ranging from large telecom companies, financial services, technology, retail and consumer packaged goods see this as the way to prep, blend and analyze the huge amounts of data to drive deeper insights.

“For the business user with multiple execution engines, you need one user interface on top.  This is key to where Alteryx comes in; Alteryx is able to speak to both Impala and Spark at the same time,” said Amr Awadallah, Founder and CTO of Cloudera in this video.  “We are just at the beginning of the movement to leverage both technologies, and Alteryx is able to do this with in-database blending and processing without having to move the data, which ultimately is very useful for that business user.”

Driving Large Scale Analytics in Non-Hadoop Systems

In many situations, our customers are using analytic databases in conjunction with Hadoop. With Alteryx, you aren’t limited to blending data via Spark in Hadoop in-memory or in-database blending with many databases such as Oracle, Amazon and Teradata. To that end, you can scale those efforts up to huge datasets for blending and analytics without having to move the data. You can even choose datasets that live in all of these repositories, blend them together, and then start your analysis.

Analytic Independence

Alteryx is quickly becoming the de-facto data blending and advanced analytics platform for the line-of-business analyst. They are ditching their spreadsheets, as they see how Alteryx is more reliable, easier to troubleshoot, and most of all, automates the data preparation process everytime the data changes. Others are moving to Alteryx and becoming independent from IT or SQL coding, as they find it easier to use and faster to workout their data flows. Being in control of their own models allows them to be agile, to change the models quickly to answer new questions, and to iterate to big insights faster.

Integrated Advanced Analytics

But beyond getting the data into a format for analysis, Alteryx gives analysts a place to grow. Many analysts spend so much time trying to get their data in shape for analysis, they don’t have enough time to really dig into the insights their data is providing. With Alteryx not only do they have time to analyze the data, but now that they have historical data and a broad context, they can now start to apply the powerful geo-spatial and predictive analytics capabilities that Alteryx provides, with the same easy drag and drop interface. Analysts find that they move from data pickers to insight givers in a matter of weeks.

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See JC Raveneau, Sr. Director, Product Management at Alteryx, deliver a session entitled: “Code Free Blending of Massive Datasets Using Cloudera and Alteryx”

Expo Floor Theater, Weds Sept 30  11:15-11:25 AM

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