Analytics
News, events, thought leadership and more.
There is a lot of buzz in the analytics world right now about the Tableau IPO – and rightly so. This is a major milestone that further proves out the emergence of a new analytics stack that delivers on what Tom Davenport refers to as “Analytics 3.0”.
It also demonstrates that while a lot of the hype in the industry over the last two years has revolved around the emergence of the Data Scientist (an important role no doubt); what has often gone overlooked is the increasing importance and rapidly expanding skillset of Data Analysts inside line of business units. These are the folks in marketing, merchandising, finance, operations, real estate, engineering, customer analytics, and sales who know their industry and business but need better tools than just Excel spreadsheets and static reports. Make no mistake: these users, which are the core community fueling Tableau’s success, are the same users Alteryx empowers with its Strategic Analytics Platform, and the same users that are driving the Analytics revolution going on right now.
Tableau has been a great partner to Alteryx – in fact, we are just coming up for our breath after participating in 28 cities of Tableau’s 8.0 roadshow, “Data Gets Its Day”, right on the heels of our Inspire conference, which Tableau sponsored – and we couldn’t be happier for them. In fact, our companies share the same target audiences in line-of-business data analysts, end users and business executives, and a similar vision of putting the power of data analysis in their hands by making analytics faster and easier. We address that vision in complementary ways:
Tableau’s core strength is its awesome visualization and interactive user experience working with data, and Alteryx has focused on integrating and enriching data and easily performing sophisticated spatial, statistical and predictive analytics to produce rich analytic data sets and analytic apps. With our most recent release, Alteryx Strategic Analytics 8.5, analysts can use Alteryx for blending or integrating their data and performing sophisticated analytics, and then output to the native Tableau file format to do their data visualization in Tableau.
I enjoyed the keynote that Tableau CEO Christian Chabot delivered at last November’s Tableau Customer Conference because it focused almost entirely on the role of creativity in analytics and the importance of enabling creative people to take advantage of data. It really resonated with those of us at Alteryx, as we’ve been talking for the last couple of years about the emergence of a “Data Artisan” – a data analyst who has evolved his or her skills to acquire some of the skills of a data scientist (such as ability to work with Hadoop data and social media streams and perform predictive analytics) but whose core strength is creating the analytic story and relating their analysis back to the business to drive value.
And let me assure you this is a very focused and passionate community – I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in that Tableau keynote, the launch of Tableau 8.0, and hearing 3,000 data analysts erupt with applause at the unveiling of the “Treemaps” feature and the revelation that multiple fields can now go into a single label. We experienced a very similar level of passion in our customer base at the Inspire conference in March. So with the Tableau IPO imminent, we are not only happy for our friends at Tableau, but also for the Data Analyst community and emerging Data Artisans, as this is really another validation of the growing impact they are having on the way analytics drive business decisions.
Congratulations to Tableau and power to the data analysts!
Rick Schultz
SVP of Marketing, Alteryx
