Alteryx Applies Analytics Directly Against Hadoop

The Hadoop Challenge for Business Intelligence and Analytics Users

With Hadoop becoming a major source of data in the enterprise, it’s only natural for users to want analytics applications to be deployed where the data resides. With that goal in mind, Alteryx plans to soon allow users of the Alteryx Analytics application to read and write directly to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Paul Ross, vice president of product and industry marketing for Alteryx, says that beyond the sheer volume of data that can be stored in Hadoop, the other significant benefit is that Hadoop allows multiple types of data to be stored in its raw format. Through Alteryx Analytics, users can more easily compare and contrast large amounts of data regardless of the format in which it was created.

Scheduled to be available in the third quarter, Ross says the other benefit of Hadoop is that it eliminates the need to rely on aggregate data. Instead of working with, for example, a subset of the available data to project an outcome, the analytics are more accurate because they are based on all of the available data.

The next version of Alteryx will support all major Hadoop distributions. As an added bonus, the release will also include direct access to the Cloudera implementation of HDFS.

With Hadoop rapidly emerging as a common data hub for enterprise applications, IT organizations should expect to see the number of applications looking to tab directly into Hadoop increase significantly in the months ahead. The implications that such a shift will have for data warehousing strategies will vary by IT organization. But as far as unstructured data goes, it is clear that Hadoop is rapidly winding its way to the center of the data universe.