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Analytics

News, events, thought leadership and more.
BobL
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

Alteryx President and COO George Mathew delivered a rousing keynote on Wednesday morning during Inspire 2014 in celebration of the significant contributions being made by data analysts. These analysts have the business skills and data savvy to support the next best decision, and are invaluable to their organizations in driving insights.  I thought it was worth a bit of a recap, now that the buzz of Inspire is starting to settle down. 

 

George used the example of the Deepwater Horizon “Well Integrity Team” as a highly-visible example of how data and analytics can be brought together to solve significant problems. But, he pointed out that the reality for most data analysts is a world where there is no super-team coming to rescue the day.  Analysts have always been the centerpiece of great analytic decisions for their company, but now they’re expected to deliver better and faster responses with fewer resources, and do it with low latency and less overhead.

 

 

He then provided a recap of a recent Bain & Company report that looked at over 400 companies with revenue greater than $1B. They found that only 4% of companies are really good at analytics, and these elite organizations were:

 

  • 2X as likely to be in the top quartile of financial performance within their industries
  • 3X more likely to execute decisions as intended
  • and 5X more likely to make decisions faster.

 

Clearly, analytics is a game changer, but he asked the attendees, “Are today’s analytics tools serving you well?” He described the frustrations many analysts have had to deal with when they try to use traditional spreadsheets, web-based spreadsheets, and custom coding for analytics. To illustrate his points, he showed a clip from our popular YouTube video about what it’s like to deal with “The Institute” on high-priority analytics projects.

 

Fortunately, the 700 customers and prospects at Inspire 2014 have already discovered a better way for data blending and advanced analytics. George walked everyone through the key features we recently delivered in Alteryx Analytics 9.0, relative to customer analytics, enterprise-scale analytics, and unchained analytics from legacy tools such as SAS. Then, Damian Austin,  our lead Solutions Engineer at Alteryx, delivered a comprehensive demo of Alteryx Analytics 9.0 using a workflow that blended data from SAS, Amazon Redshift, and Marketo, then applied predictive models to identify the prospects most likely to reply to a theoretical marketing campaign.

 

 

In the next section of his presentation, George talked about the new way that data is managed in the “Age of Abundance” we live in now – a time where storage, memory, and computing power are significantly cheaper as compared to the “Age of Scarcity” when SPSS and SAS shipped their initial releases in 1968 and 1972 respectively. Hadoop allows us to take advantage of these abundant resources, giving us a way to manage data in any size, shape, or form without preconceived cleansing, aggregation, or calculation. He invited Alan Saldich, VP of Marketing at Cloudera, to join him on stage to talk more about this revolutionary approach to data management. Then, George announced that analysts will soon be able to read and write data directly from/to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as part of the next release of Alteryx Analytics. Damian delivered a brief demo that showed the new tools, and how data can be read and written directly to HDFS.

 

 

Then, George talked about “The Way Data is Discovered” in today’s modern analytic world. To illustrate his points, he turned to the recent presentation by Gartner analysts Joao Tapadinhas and Dan Sommer at the Gartner BI and Analytics Conference in April on “The Destructive Impact of Data Discovery.” He discussed how these Gartner analysts believe that in 2014, half of new license spend in BI will be driven by data discovery requirements, and that IT’s role is “shifting from total control to traffic control” – enabling access to data to let data analysts free to derive their own insights. Their conclusion: “If you need visualization with data blending and advanced analytics, you have two choices, Tableau with Alteryx or Alteryx with Qlik.” Dan Jewett, VP of Product Management at Tableau Software, joined George on stage to talk about the incredible customer growth trajectory that Tableau and Alteryx have been on together, the most common use cases, and what the future of data discovery will enable for organizations. This was followed by Damian’s final demo, which continued his initial demo, but showed how the results could refresh an existing Tableau workbook.

 

 

 

George concluded with examples of technology that was once dominant which have been completely replaced: the Atari 2600 videogame system with the Sony PS4, a Sony Walkman and Rolodex with the modern smartphone, and Blockbuster videotape rental with Redbox and streaming video. He said the same is happening in analytics where legacy analytics like SAS and SPSS have given way to a new analytics stack built with best-in-breed technology:

 

  • Cloudera and the rest of the Hadoop innovators who have revolutionized how data is managed
  • Tableau in how data is discovered, and
  • Alteryx in the way that data is blended and analyzed