Inspire 2014: The World Cup of Analytics

[RickS]

I couldn’t be more excited for the events in the next few days… and while yes, I am a huge soccer fan who is incredibly psyched that the World Cup kicks off Thursday… I am also extremely fired up for our annual Inspire Conference, which starts on Monday.  Here’s why:

1. Familiar faces:  It’s the one time of year we get to see most of our customers all in one place and hear about their latest innovations with Alteryx, their passion for the product, their questions, ideas and plans.  We have some extremely loyal and passionate users, and their interactions amongst themselves and with the Alteryx team are invaluable.  
2. New faces:  Inspire continues to grow like crazy – we will have over 600 attendees next week - and part of the growth this year is coming from a range of new customers and prospects across Retail, Restaurants, Consulting, Financial Services, Healthcare, Media, and Manufacturing.  I’m not only looking forward to meeting a lot of these folks for the first time, but also witnessing their interactions with our long-time and loyal users. From these conversations, they can learn a lot about Alteryx and different applications of the technology – and vice versa as I’m sure they will bring lots of new ideas about analytics best practices.
3. Knowledge Sharing:  As always, attendees will have the opportunity to learn from all the Alteryx folks; the trainings are going to be packed (yes, we heard you and added a lot more this year!), we have several sessions on “Tips & Tricks,” Data Blending and Predictive, the Roadmap & Vision will be covered in the Keynotes, and the 1:1s with the engineering team in the Solutions Center will be popular as always. But just as important, customers learn a lot from each other – about best practices, different use cases, ideas, etc. – this occurs not only in the networking breaks, meals and parties, but also in the sessions - 75% of which are delivered by customers. We are fortunate this year to have an amazing lineup of customer speakers from Verizon, McDonald’s, Charles Schwab, Cardinal Health, Kaiser Permanente, Ingersoll Rand, Consumer Reports, Room & Board, Time Warner Cable and more (you can see the entire speaker lineup here) on a range of topics including Data Blending, Predictive Analytics, Geospatial analysis, and using Alteryx together with Tableau.
4. Competition:  It’s fun to watch the best data analysts and Alteryx users in the world go head-to-head to solve analytics challenges in front of 600 people; so if you are attending, don’t miss the Alteryx Grand Prix (a longstanding Inspire tradition) on Tuesday night.
5. Global Partners:  Partner participation is key to the success of Inspire – it helps our users and prospects figure out how Alteryx fits with their complementary product and service offerings. And this year we are proud of our best sponsor lineup ever, one that will provide attendees a good mix of solutions across BI & visualization (Tableau is our top sponsor and Qlik, a new Alteryx partner, is sponsoring for the first time) with data players (like DataSift, Experian, Dun & Bradstreet and TomTom) - plus a number of analytic consulting partners (you can see the entire sponsor lineup here).  But just as important, we are proud of the global representation we will have at the conference this year from our partner community.  We have partners attending from Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, India, Panama, and… yes, even Brazil where our new partner Conjecto is so dedicated to Alteryx he is forgoing a week of the World Cup action to attend Inspire. (Look for our more detailed blog on this topic tomorrow.)

So see you all next week, and if you are looking forward to the conference as much as I am or have requests, Tweet them at us with #Inspire14.  It will be a week to learn, reconnect, network and enjoy!

If you haven’t registered yet, do it now – you won’t regret it. 

(And if, like me, you are equally passionate about the World Cup and analytics also take a few minutes to check out Nate Silver’s fascinating blog post “It’s Brazil’s World Cup to Lose”  - complete with an interactive tool that calculates every team’s chances of advancing past the group stage and winning the Cup).