Analytics
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Last week’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco attracted over 130,000 registered attendees, which made the Cloud Expo halls in Moscone North and West two very exciting and busy places. I was the first presenter in the Cloud Expo Partner Theater on Monday afternoon, and it was standing room only for my presentation on “Accelerating the Sales and Marketing Cycle with Analytics.” You can download my slides here.
In the subsequent conversations I had with attendees after my presentation, as well as the hundreds I had with visitors to our booth, I heard a lot of similar and familiar challenges:
- Salesforce.com is an important repository for customer data, but it’s only one source of many that is needed to answer today’s most strategic business questions.
- Attempts by line-of-business analysts to blend the various structured and unstructured data types often results in a lot of manual, time-consuming work that has to be repeated on a daily or weekly basis.
- The analytic solutions to get insight from multiple data sources are overly complex, forcing them to relinquish control to IT staff that don’t have the intimate business knowledge or sense of urgency they have.
- Senior management doesn’t have an appreciation for the time it takes to do all of this, and occupies a lot of their time with requests to modify and run existing reports when they could be working on new projects.
We had a booth at Dreamforce because we believe (and our hundreds of customers tell us) that we have a unique solution which empowers line-of-business analysts with tools that bring drag-and-drop simplicity to tasks that were previously very complex. In response to these four challenges:
- We believe that the quality of the insight at the end of the process is a direct reflection of the breadth of data that can be pulled in at the beginning of the analysis. That’s why Alteryx includes a wide variety of connectors to wherever the data is stored – from spreadsheets and databases that reside on your hard drive, to OleDB, ODBC, Hadoop, and other connections to data warehouses, and of course, to data in the cloud such as Salesforce.com and social media. These connectors allow line-of-business users to pull data from massive and complex data sources without having to write any code whatsoever.
Our workflow-based design paradigm allows you to automate repetitive tasks so you build the process once, then simply run it over and over when the data or criteria changes. Our customers tell horror stories about what it was like before Alteryx to pass data back and forth between Excel, Access, MapInfo, Acrobat, Crystal Reports, and lots of other point solutions to produce a report, then do it all again next week. We have dozens of data preparation, cleansing, and standardization tools within Alteryx that replicate the functionality of these point solutions, but allow you to keep the data within one program to streamline processes and eliminate errors. Many customers find that they can justify the cost of Alteryx because it eliminates the manual work that used to occupy a large percentage of their time.- Alteryx makes sophisticated analytics more accessible to everyone, with no need for complex code writing. To apply advanced predictive, statistical and other analytics tools you simply drag and drop each tool into the workflow. Alteryx includes the open-source R statistical language, but gives it a modern graphical user interface that makes even the most complex statistical analysis easy to apply.
- Alteryx allows line-of-business analysts to develop an analytic workflow and publish it to the innovative Alteryx Analytics Gallery, where it can be shared with colleagues and decision makers in their organization. Senior managers can browse analytic applications in a setting similar to a mobile app store, then run an app by making selections based on the criteria they want to study. They can get answers without having to build their own workflows, and also without disrupting your work to modify existing reports. The Salesforce district in the Alteryx Analytics Gallery has several apps that read data from Salesforce.com based on selected criteria, then blend it with third-party data from Experian and D&B to find new revenue opportunities, optimize sales and marketing campaign strategies, improve forecasting accuracy, and more.
Next Steps
If you’d like to learn more about how analytics can be used to get a complete picture of your customers across all channels and systems, please download A Buyer's Guide to Customer Analytics. This eight-page guide offers practical advice on how to select a customer analytics platform and begin to anticipate customer behavior to create stronger, longer lasting relationships with your customers.
Many people who came by the booth wanted to dive right in and see how Alteryx can work with their own data. If you subscribe to the “seeing is believing” approach, I urge you to download a free copy of Alteryx Project Edition, so you can see how easy it is to blend data, and automate some of the repetitive tasks you will face in the coming weeks. If you can identify with the challenges above, you’ll be glad you did.
