Analytics
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Alteryx has been the gold sponsor of the Tableau 8 ‘Data Gets Its Day’ Roadshow. We wanted to take a few moments from the busy schedule (View the schedule here), recap some of the great conversations we have had so far, and to let you know that if you have been unable to attend, you can see the joint Alteryx/Tableau demonstration in this webinar on Wednesday.
What has been amazing about these events is the alignment between Alteryx users and Tableau users. Quite often the same people within an organization are using Alteryx to gather sources and run deep analytics, and then Tableau for visualization and analysis. The customers we have met are just as excited and evangelistic about Alteryx as they are about Tableau. The products are very complementary, jointly providing a best-of-breed solution for business analysts.
Business analysts can easily create drag and drop workflows that gather, cleanse and blend data, and then enrich it with third party data. They can then determine which analytics to put into play, and choose from tons of modules that provide statistical, predictive or geo-spatial analytics. With Tableau version 8, Alteryx can launch the results directly in Tableau to give analysts instant access to visualizations. Analysts can then work with this rich dataset in Tableau, where they can modify the view based upon the supplied attributes such as mosaic groups, gender, location and other attributes.
A couple of areas appear to overlap between the products, but with a little investigation, business users are able to choose the best practices for their goals.
One area is data blending. There is often considerable work that needs to happen to the data before joining it all together. This is one of the great strengths of Alteryx. Alteryx can quickly merge multiple disparate data sources together in a single environment. It can even use Fuzzy Matching logic to blend datasets based on sound algorithms, which enables Alteryx to match a customer file with the Experian Household file for data enrichment.
Alteryx can also handle unstructured or semi-structured data. This can include SharePoint data, XML, or even social media content. This content can be blended into the analysis to bring details on usage, file structure, or even sentiment analysis.
Another area that appears to have overlap is mapping. The combination of Alteryx for spatial analysis and Tableau for mapping is awesome. Alteryx provides excellent spatial analytics that can be combined with other data to perform analyses such as gravity modeling to optimize new network locations. (Gravity models are used to predict behaviors that show a similar phenomenon to gravity. They often have components of mass and distance, making gravity a good metaphor for analysis.) Alteryx also provides street-level geocoding. Addresses are specific to a street-level location, so the result is centered over a house or business or on the street in front of it. This enables very specific analytics such as drive times for a group of customers or prospects. The resulting dataset can be presented in Tableau, providing striking visualizations that lead to quick and deep insights.
Alteryx is also really good at spatial joins - joining point data to the spatial polygon it resides within. This allows you to overlay two sets of data in a geography, which drives great mapping representations in Tableau.
Customers are loving the roadshows. They are glued to their seats as Tableau is revealing the new features in the Version 8 release, one of which is the opening of the TDE file format. Alteryx is the first partner to take advantage of this feature, enabling Alteryx data sets to be output directly to TDE format. Not only does this ensure the data is totally prepared for visualization in Tableau, it even means that business analysts can launch analytics results directly into Tableau. That means that users don’t have to save a file to the file system, go to Tableau, and then find that file and open it – the result is a huge timesaver that lets people stay in the flow of their thinking, not having to be interrupted as they move from Alteryx to Tableau.
If you can’t get out to any of the roadshow events where Alteryx is presenting, make sure to sign up for this webinar on Wednesday March 27th. We will present Alteryx and Tableau together, showing you a demonstration of the best of breed combination of the strategic analytics of Alteryx and the insightful visualizations of Tableau.
Brian Dirking |
Jim Schattin |
Richard Snow |
