Alteryx Analytics Cloud Consolidates Acquisitions and Functionality
Alteryx, best known for its Alteryx Designer product for building complex data pipelines in a drag-and-drop, low-code environment, has been steadily making acquisitions over the years. Earlier this month, it announced its new Alteryx Analytics Cloud service, which brings many of them together.
Last year, Alteryx acquired Hyper Anna, a cloud platform that automates the generation of AI-driven insights from data. The insights can help highlight anomalies in data while enabling various user personas to be part of the analytics journey, regardless of technical level. In 2019, Alteryx picked up Feature Labs, an automated machine learning (AutoML) platform.
More recently, Alteryx acquired Trifacta, which offers a well-known self-service data preparation and data engineering platform. With this acquisition, Alteryx was able to provide a low/no-code analytics data engineering solution, with deployment flexibility (on-premises, cloud and hybrid) to boot.
Now, Alteryx brings their recent acquisitions into one platform: Alteryx Analytics Cloud. The platform consists of four modules, comprised of the flagship Designer platform and products from the three aforementioned acquisitions:
- Alteryx Designer Cloud, Alteryx’s homegrown data pipeline platform, is the basis for the cloud suite. As with its on-premises predecessors, this product helps create pipelines that connect to, transform, blend and even analyze data. This product, which is available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is aimed at analysts and business users.
- Trifacta constitutes another module in Alteryx Analytics Cloud. Trifacta is aimed at data engineers and it supports a powerful interface for data prep and transformation. Despite the overlap in capabilities, Trifacta complements Alteryx Designer Cloud as the two target different user personas, with Designer Cloud aimed at business users and Trifacta aimed at data engineers. Trifacta is available on all major clouds: AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
- Alteryx Machine Learning, the successor to the Feature Labs product, brings guided AutoML capabilities and comprises the third module in Alteryx Analytics Cloud. This product guides users through the process of creating and training machine learning models, then scoring data against (making predictions with) them. Alteryx Machine Learning is aimed at business users and analysts and is available on AWS.
- Alteryx Auto Insights, as the name would suggest, offers AI-driven automated insights. This module is based on the technology from the Hyper Anna acquisition. Like its predecessor, Alteryx Auto Insights works through causal analysis that helps business users understand their data thoroughly. Alteryx Auto Insights, available on Microsoft Azure, is meant to augment the exploratory analysis available from dashboards, by providing generated insights alongside them
All products within Alteryx Analytics Cloud offer integration with Slack to share insights and send notifications about issues to individuals and teams. The four products can be purchased separately or in combination, with the latter route potentially offering bundled pricing advantages.
Stars Aligning
The enormous number of startups in the analytics industry caused a fragmentation that is now giving way to consolidation, both corporately and technologically. Alteryx is clearly looking to be one of the pioneers of this change via Analytics Cloud.
On that very subject, Alteryx VP of Product Management, Jay Henderson said to The New Stack, “I think we are all starting to see a wave of consolidation… driven by customer needs. We are seeing companies really looking to enable lots of different personas within their organization; everyone from IT and data engineers to analysts and business teams…we are really trying to figure out how to democratize analytics.”
Deploying analytics platforms that apply across organizational roles not only helps users increase their productivity, it also lowers costs by reducing the number of products needed for analytics and the work required to integrate them. With data’s rapid move to the cloud has come a desire by enterprise organizations to do analytics there too. Alteryx Analytics Cloud strengthens Alteryx’s portfolio and helps it pioneer a solution mindful of current analytics trends, including cloud growth, integrated solutions, and democratization.