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Analytics, Apps & Data for Success in the Digital Enterprise

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July 21, 2022

Virtual Summit

Alteryx continues to simplify enterprise-class analytics projects with its latest updates. Top enhancements include updated AI/ML features, self-service, cloud connectivity and governance.

“Our latest innovations enable businesses to become data-driven and overcome potential obstacles, including data silos and talent scarcity,” said Suresh Vittal, chief product officer at Alteryx.

IDN goes deep on Alteryx’s top enhancements with Kalyan Ramanathan, senior vice president, product and solution marketing at Alteryx. 

Alteryx Auto Insights is now “seamlessly integrated” with the company’s Designer Desktop and Server capabilities. This allows users to “automatically connect, configure and schedule” Auto Insights directly from their workflows and gain AI-driven insights from their data, Ramanathan noted, adding:  

Auto Insights allows business users to self-serve AI-driven automatic insights, seamlessly integrating not only with Designer Desktop but now also with Alteryx Server 21.2 and later. Workflows that include Auto Insights can be scheduled so users can automate the prep and blend of the data and automatically send insights directly to a business user’s inbox. Analysts can automate delivery by simply dragging and dropping the Auto Insights tool into their workflow, connecting to Auto Insights from Designer or Server.   

Alteryx Machine Learning adds enhancements to its predictive Time Series Modeling capabilities. Notably, even non-technical business users can more easily build ML models thanks to new functionality for trending, seasonality, and increased performance.

Ramanathan described some common expected Alteryx ML use cases: 

From predicting rates of failure, to risk for equipment breakdown, to forecasting inventory needs, we see interest in solving time series problems from both technical and non-technical users. Alteryx Machine Learning is designed to make time series modeling, including trending and seasonality characteristics, accessible to non-technical users.  

Alteryx Auto ML also adds fresh capabilities to help new users get started quickly with analytics-driven machine learning. Ramanathan shared some details with IDN: 

We are regularly updating and improving the efficiency of processing, adding new capabilities, incorporating feedback, and improving usability.

 

In addition to the time series modeling options described above, Alteryx also launched an improved experience for those getting started with AutoML.

 

Simulations are now available so that users can make changes to data, visualize the effects on the prediction result, improve prediction explanations with robust charting, and export easily to share with colleagues. Improved outlier detection and options for easily removing outlier data points from the model training process are also now available.   

Alteryx’s Expanding Connectivity Also Powers Modern Cloud Analytics

Alteryx also announced “enhanced integrations” to popular cloud data warehouses (including Databricks, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery). 

The latest integrations help enterprises more easily adopt modern analytics architectures that can span a mix of cloud data warehouses, data lakehouses and SaaS apps -- alongside on-premises and hybrid resources, he added. 

The company said these new integrations would support high-performance native pushdown capabilities, shortening the time to derive insights from big data sets from hours to minutes. 

Integrations from Alteryx’s acquisition of Trifacta also deliver on the company’s vision for a “unified analytics automation platform,” Ramanathan said. 

The vision with the Trifacta acquisition was to create a unified analytics automation platform in the cloud by combining our leading low code/no code analytics experience with Trifacta’s cloud-native capabilities. 

 

Trifacta’s cloud-native integrations form the ubiquitous connectivity foundation for our unified Alteryx Analytics Cloud offerings that complement Alteryx’s existing integrations (including existing in-DB capabilities) in our on-premise offerings. Together, our cloud and on-premise offerings provide our customers with deployment flexibility and advanced connectivity to cloud data warehouses.  

 

Designer Cloud powered by Trifacta is our first deep integration that supports that vision, and we are continuing to integrate our offerings across this platform.  

Designer Cloud by Trifacta combines Alteryx Designer’s ease of use with the Trifacta cloud-native multi-tenant architecture. Alteryx announced this edition adds SSH tunneling capabilities to enhance security in the cloud.

One customer is already benefitting from the Trifecta/Alteryx combination. 

“Thanks to Google Cloud Dataprep by Trifacta’s self-service data engineering and its BigQuery Pushdown Optimization capabilities, we were able to spend 15 minutes rewriting a legacy process that historically took more than five hours to complete,” said Bekkie Brown, Manager, Data Platforms & Operations at Amway. “Our new process runs in 22 seconds, dropping our consumption cost by approximately 90 percent.”  

Alteryx added other ease-of-use capabilities, including:

• Alteryx Designer adds a modern look and feel with new tools, layout icons, and fonts.
• Alteryx Intelligence Suite adds Text Mining and Computer Vision capabilities, including a barcode reader tool, part of speech tool, and critical value pair tool. These intelligent tools allow users to analyze unstructured data quickly.
• New support for persistent and non-persistent Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments allows users easily manage Alteryx in large-scale virtualized environments.

At least one analyst applauded Alteryx’s latest moves to simplify analytics and make it more available to all-sized firms.

“Democratization of analytics is key to unlocking valuable insights in this rapidly changing business landscape, yet we have found fewer than 30 percent of knowledge workers have access to or are active users of analytics software beyond spreadsheets,” said Dan Vesset, group vice president of Analytics and Information Management, IDC. “To become a truly data-driven enterprise, businesses need to leverage analytics solutions that support ubiquitous connectivity to data, rich governance, and powerful, intuitive decision support capabilities.”

Alteryx also announced it is starting Early Access for its Metric Store capability. The Metric store will allow enterprises to easily define standard key performance indicators that can be reused by anyone in the organization to rapidly, consistently, and accurately derive insights.