In Case you Missed the Q1 2022 Alter.Next Event
If you missed the recent Q1 2022 Alter.Next event, we’ve put together a summary of all the key discussions and announcements for you.
Alteryx’s mission statement for 2022: to enable every person to transform data into a breakthrough.
Alteryx are committed to democratising data for everyone, regardless of whether that data exists on-premise or in the cloud.
They have seen that when businesses use Alteryx to democratise data and analytics across the enterprise, employees in every line of business are empowered to accelerate digital transformation and drive profitability.
In addition, the COVID pandemic has greatly increased the need for this digital transformation.
“In fact, 83% of executives say they need to be more data-driven to remain competitive compared to before the pandemic.”
The outcome is that “62% of practitioners and 75% of mid-to-upper management are expected to make data-driven decisions.” From top to bottom, employees from across the organisation need access to analytics tools that are easy to use to help them drive better outcomes using data insights, irrespective of their technical know-how.
Alteryx believes there is a 3-stage process to completing their mission of democratising data and analytics:
Analytics for All - make data and analytics approachable to all by using tools that are just accessible as they are powerful.
Upskilling - empowering workers by enabling teams across every department to be confident while being data-driven is crucial.
Automation - we must rethink redundancies and provide avenues to drive efficiency and repeatability through automation to reuse and share analytics workflows that improve productivity.
Insights from the IDC - a Global Market Research Company
According to the IDC (International Data Corporation), across all industries, the overarching need for all businesses is the increased agility to make decisions faster and more informed by data and analytics. Things will only become more volatile in the future, so this aim is crucial moving forward.
Executives are using data to drive decision making now more than ever; the number of chief analytics officers (CAOs) and chief data officers (CDOs) to champion data and analytics strategies in organisations are becoming increasingly more frequent across all sectors. Having these dedicated leaders shows a large change in the value that organisations are attributing to data and analytics.
Cloud technology is crucial for the democratisation of data and analytics because:
It simplifies the process by reducing the friction that has historically existed with on-premise deployments.
Currently, the cloud represents 50% of all investments in data and analytics technologies.
Investment in cloud data management is growing 3x faster than on-premise.
It adds scalability to organisations for their volume of data, number of concurrent users, computing power, and security.
Moving analytics to data that exists in the cloud is far cheaper than moving data on-premise to conduct analytics.
Alteryx Analytics Cloud
Alteryx officially announced their Analytics Cloud offering, consisting of the following:
TRIFACTA - an IT and data engineering cloud platform which connects seamlessly with other Alteryx products.
Alteryx Designer Cloud - a cloud deployment of the existing desktop Designer. Alteryx Designer Cloud provides interoperability with desktop Designer, allowing users to share assets between the two platforms seamlessly.
Alteryx Machine Learning - a cloud deployment of the existing desktop machine learning, ensuring machine learning capabilities are available for Alteryx Designer Cloud.
Alteryx Auto Insights - formerly Hyper Anna, allows the automation of analysis and reporting by finding insights hidden in data and summarising them automatically in the cloud.
“Alteryx Auto Insights is like having another skilled analyst to collaborate with who finds anomalies and surfaces insights, explaining and clearly presenting them instantly.“
Updates to Existing Alteryx Products - Release 2021.4
Alteryx have ensured that they will continue investing and updating their existing on-premise products alongside expanding their cloud offerings. The most recent of these updates coming from their new 2021.4 release. The highlights of which are the following:
New Alteryx Server APIs - allows users to programmatically configure settings for users, workflows, schedules and more.
Alteryx Designer Data Connection Manager - provides the ability to create data connections that can be shared across workflows and synced with Alteryx Server. Any updates made to these data connections then persist across all instances of that connection, increasing efficiency and security across the organisation.
New Data Connectors - new connectors have been released for Automation Anywhere, Anaplan, Office 365, and Google Drive to ensure your organisation can connect to any data source.
Named Entity Recognition - a new Text Mining tool that enables users to intelligently extract the names of people, organisations, locations, and more from text in several different languages.