Alteryx Aims to Simplify Data Discovery

At an Inspire 2017 conference this week, Alteryx announced it will be extending the self-service capabilities this fall following its acquisition of Yhat in addition to increasing the total number of data sources available within the Alteryx Designer analytics workbench application.

Bob Laurent, vice president of product marketing at Alteryx, says Alteryx Connect will make it possible for business users to more easily explore multiple data sources regardless of physical location. The acquisition of Yhat follows an Alteryx move to add data management capabilities by Semanta earlier this year. To complement that effort, Alteryx Designer now support 75 data sources via built-in connectors.

“We want to make it simpler for users to blend different data sources,” says Laurent.

Alteryx Connect, says Laurent, will not only make it simpler to discover those data sources, but also capture any workflows that have been created around them. That capability should make it simpler for organizations to capture tribal corporate knowledge concerning, for example, the most accurate set of data to use to drive an analytics application, says Laurent.

Laurent says Alteryx plans to make Alteryx Connect available as an add-on product to its core Alteryx Server offering.

In general, IT organizations are increasingly being asked to get out of the way when it comes to analytics. IT organizations are critical to setting up these applications. But the days when IT staff are employed to generate reports using SQL queries are coming to an end. End users are increasingly able to self-service their own requirements using analytic applications that enable them to drill down into data as they best see fit. That may take some getting used to in some quarters of the IT organization. But overall, it should lead to much better state of business intelligence (BI) affairs for all concerned.