Alteryx has enhanced their productline with a new software release called Visualytics. From my reading on Fool forums the visual presentation of data has been a limiting factor with Alteryx. If i recall correctly this was an area that Tableau excelled at compared to AYX? This new product shows that AYX was aware of this limitation and are moving to address it. As a former biomedical researcher I am aware of how important visualizing/presenting your data in a graphically meaningful way is. This should help increase utilization as it brings more processes under a single product… having to move from one product to another from cleansing, analysis, to visual representation is not ideal. In my mind i would love the thought of using one vendors product from start of process to finish.
It’s not that visual presentation of data has been a limiting factor for Alteryx, it wasn’t really the point of their tools. What Alteryx is providing is a visual tool for building a data analysis workflow. In the designer you have your data sources on the left and your goal - clean, machine-learning-ready data set on the far right. In between you plot all the steps you have to take to get from “dirty” data to “clean” data. What you would typically do in these steps is things like combining data sources, converting data from text to a common format (like for common date-time format or common decimal separator), removing duplicates, combining your data with comon world data like with adding distances between your locations etc. This is called “data prep” - the area of data science where Alteryx has got no competitor.
Data visualization would be one of the next steps that you could do after you were done with data prep and that’s where you would take something like Tableau. Now it seems Alteryx is expanding into a new area of the data business. Here they will have competition and will have to catch up if they want to make an impact. I think it’s a good idea to add some visualization tools to help you understand your data as you are doing your data prep. However, getting customers to stop using Tableau will not be easy. On the other hand - if they already have the foot in the door, why not go all the way!
Has anyone looked at looker (looker.com)? They seem to do the same or similar thing as Alteryx. They are private but it seems like they are growing faster and taking more of the mid size companies looking for this type of tool
They don’t offer anything for data prep as far as I can tell. They direct you to somehow shove all your data into a SQL database using python, R and/or TensorFlow (programming/scripting languages) and then they can perform data analytics over that. It’s not really impressive as applying machine learning or data mining algorithms on pre-formatted data is the simpler part of data science. Also unimpressive is that they don’t seem to integrate directly with a cloud API - setting up a SQL database as your core interface is so 90’s.
They may do good business doing data mining consulting and deployment for various companies, but they are no competitor to Alteryx.