Analytics
News, events, thought leadership and more.
While I was in London last week for the official launch of Alteryx UK, a technology reporter asked me: “Do you find the UK is a little further behind the US when it comes to analytics – especially predictive analytics and Big Data?” I thought a little bit about the question and then answered “I don’t think the UK is further behind … but I think there is a sudden surge in interest and excitement around data blending and advanced analytics in the UK. Right now, there is a ton of interest in and adoption of new analytics tools – like Alteryx – that empower data analysts.”
Maybe the UK’s passion for newer, better, deeper analytics is seeing a spike and there really is some kind of ‘analytics awakening’ going on there. Or maybe I’m just noticing it more right now because Alteryx is officially entering the European market… but even if the latter is the case, it sure is the perfect time for us to be doing so! Indeed, a similar level of hunger and enthusiasm for the topic and the tools that Alteryx CEO Dean Stoecker and I experienced earlier last week – and that I covered in my last blog – continued last Thursday, May 1st at a London event we held with our partners Tableau Software, Revolution Analytics and The Information Lab at Level 31 Paramount.
The May 1st event was our official Alteryx UK launch event – really part of a whole launch week in London during which we announced our European expansion , but kind of our final summit to cap off the week. 120 analytics professionals turned out – all of whom are passionate about analytics, and many of whom are quite so about Alteryx in particular. At times, the event even seemed to border on an Alteryx love fest. In fact, Forrester analyst Martha Bennett, who was at the event, tweeted out:
Tableau Zen Master Craig Bloodworth, who is CTO of The Information Lab, called his opportunity to demo and present Alteryx at our UK launch an experience that would always be one of the highlights of his career (and later tweeted the same):
Prior to giving a killer demo of Alteryx, Craig said he felt this way because he was being a part of something special and compared the Alteryx UK launch to Tableau coming to Europe just a few years earlier.
The customer presentations were a particular highlight as customers and prospects typically want to hear from other customers and learn from their experiences. Experian’s Andrew Saville not only gave a nice talk on the value they – and two of their clients, Virgin Insight and The Cooperative – have experienced from using Alteryx Analytics, but they also showed an impactful video on the benefits each Experian analyst has had from switching from SAS to Alteryx Analytics.
Unilever data analysts Laszlo Zsom and Ryan Howarth then killed it with their presentation – entitled “Dirty Data & Dirty Laundry” – on how Alteryx helped them reduce the time and money spent on their laundry brand analytics by 90%. As part of the global analytics team at Unilever, the pair uses Alteryx to blend data from 13 different sources including spreadsheets and packaged market data and deliver more immediate and visual (via Alteryx output to Tableau) insight to their business partners. Having come from spending endless hours trying to wrangle a ton of data from a wide range of sources into massive Excel spreadsheets, the two had a little fun with some of their slides and compared their team’s (and indeed the market’s) evolution from Excel to Alteryx and Tableau to the evolution of communication from the landline to the smartphone.
In summary, Thursday’s event only reinforced my impression that data blending and advanced analytics is truly blowing up in the UK right now. It was an incredible week for Alteryx as we not only had the opportunity to officially launch our company and product into the UK market, but also to experience people’s passion for analytics first-hand.
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