I wrote up my thoughts on Alteryx’s latest moves since Oct.
https://hhhypergrowth.com/the-alteryx-forecast/
In particular, since the big APA announcement early in the summer (right after COVID made their growth screech to a halt), the CEO has continued to rehash his arguments about how most of the Global 2000 are still on-prem. WELL DUH. The problem with that is the MASSIVE move to SaaS tooling for basic business operations, driving the digital transformation that was already ongoing, and which then got a major boost from pandemic and a stay-at-home work force.
Well – the long-time founder/CEO finally bowed out in October 2020, and shuffled over to Exec Chairman. The company then hired someone with some SaaS background to replace him. And in turn, that new CEO hired a bunch of other C-suiters from his prior gig (Palo Alto) with SaaS background. So it seems the BOD finally said to hell with this on-premise stuff that Dean keeps pushing – it is finally time for the cloud.
But a major risk now exists - the company is overhauling its platform at the same time it is overhauling its upper mgmt and sales process and go-to-market. It might be the kick-in-the-ass that Alteryx needed, or… it might become a huge mess.
Beyond that, I find myself EXTREMELY unimpressed with Alteryx’s latest PR on its partnership with Snowflake. It is simply rehashing existing features and using some vague language to make it seem like they have expanded integration with Snowflake. NOPE. It’s still just the Snowflake Bulk Data Loader and the In-Database Operations that they’ve always had with some minor updates… NOT the deeper integration I’ve been looking for where it EITHER 1) embeds its functionality into Snowflake compute or 2) creates a cloud-based platform with deep integration into Snowflake’s features.
Glad I left this one. I really want to like Alteryx for enabling the Citizen Scientist and the shift to feature engineering and model automation, and will continue to watch it – but I don’t foresee any signs of stellar execution for a long while. This company has an entirely Windows-based codebase that it has to shift to the cloud. THIS IS GOING TO TAKE WHILE.
BTW, I finally bought Snowflake with a small position. Writing up some tidbits on what I really like about their positioning as the Data Cloud.
- muji
long SNOW