Analytics
News, events, thought leadership and more.
The UK’s appetite and enthusiasm for better data analytics tools and deeper customer insights is huge… and completely clear as Alteryx CEO Dean Stoecker and I travel around London this week, meeting with customers, partners and prospects. In fact, it’s becoming clearer with each event and meeting. While our week started off with some fantastic discussions around this topic with data analysts and analytics executives at leading firms in CPG, banking and retail, today’s event with partner Javelin Group really hammered it home.
While we officially launched Alteryx UK and our European presence today, the tremendous traction we already have in the UK market was extremely evident at this morning’s event hosted by Javelin and sponsored by Alteryx and Tableau. Javelin, a strong Alteryx partner here in London that specializes in retail, held an event called “Retail Analytics and Business Insight” that drew well over 70 people from retail, media, financial services and property firms – all in spite of the London tube labor issues (#whattubestrike).
The event was highlighted by the stories shared by five Alteryx customers: JD Sports Fashion, Tastecard, Carphone Warehouse, Grafton Merchandising, and Carpetright. It was exciting to see how engaged these customers are (especially as Dean’s keynote had been about the importance of moving from being “Informed” to being “Engaged” to embrace this new Analytics Power Shift we are experiencing) and even more so to see the success they have had with Alteryx. Specifically here are the three themes that struck me from today’s event:
- Deeper Insights: Several of the speakers talked about Alteryx Analytics delivering new insights that they never before were able to discover. Alistair Brown, Head of Site Research & Strategic Insight at JD Sports Fashion (a major sports clothing retailer in UK and Europe) said his team has now done extensive omnichannel analysis, specifically including a measurement of the impact that a local store presence has on online buying behavior and brand recognition in a given geography. The research, it turns out, showed that having a brick-and-mortar presence locally does have significant impact on driving ecommerce and brand awareness amongst the consumers in that region. Brown commented overall that “Alteryx has certainly changed our ability to process the data and support investment decisions with analytics.”
Another interesting example, that leveraged our strength in spatial analytics and specifically our drive time engine, was given by Tastecard CEO Ian Ronald who explained how the leading diner’s club card provider learned ‘How far will people travel to get a discount?’ (Ronald joked that they found one member who traveled 350 miles(!) … and while he claimed he was on holiday, they are not sure whether to believe him. ) The information was used to sell their service to restaurants based on each restaurant’s addressable target market.
- Hours vs. Weeks: Every customer speaker discussed how much faster they can deliver analytics that drive meaningful decisions by using Alteryx. Tastecard’s Ronald said, “We were messing around with Excel for the better part of three months and got nowhere - Alteryx sorted it in 2 days. That convinced me to buy it.” And JD Sports’ Brown commented that “Alteryx has helped us speed up our process and make better informed decisions quickly – in minutes rather than days.” Grafton Merchanting’s Head of Market Insights, who is supporting 20 business and 12 different data systems, summarized it as “Alteryx generates quick answers to complicated questions.”
- Escaping Excel Hell: Most of these customers had hit the wall with trying to do data blending in Excel before graduating to Alteryx. In addition to Ronald’s comment above, Gary Marshall, a Property Consultant for Carphone Warehouse, said the following: “A tool like Excel doesn’t work – trust me, it’s not powerful enough. We tried, but Excel isn’t powerful enough without falling over on a regular basis. Alteryx took our information from varying data sources and blended it together – and it took a matter of hours, not days or weeks, to produce this module that can output into any format. Alteryx is powerful, andquick - it’s brilliant! Trying to do this with Excel; you are doing it with one hand tied behind your back.”
Overall, this event was filled with people – both the speakers and audience – who are passionate about embracing new tools that can help them deliver better data analytics and deeper insights – faster and easier than ever before. As such, Dean’s keynote and the talks by Javelin CEO Tony Stockil and his team (a huge thank you to them for hosting the event – at the impressive Royal Institute of British Architects!), as well as Tableau’s Andy Cotgreave were all very well received.
We are looking forward to tomorrow’s Alteryx UK launch event (with Tableau Software, Revolution Analytics and The Information Lab) and to meeting more customers and prospects who are hungry and passionate for better analytics and deeper business insights.
