AYX and SNOW

Recent postings by Poffringa and by muji raise issues relating to the futue performance of AYX as it might be impinged upon by cloud ware housing and data lakes in general and by SNOW in particular. Dean Stoecker spoke to these issues in a recent conference the transcript of which is at:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4373599-alteryx-inc-ayx-ceo…

Evidently Stoecker is confident that these developments will not significantly impinge on AYX future business.

For example he was asked about the cloud.

Q when I talk to investors, they kind of struggle to understand why Alteryx is not cloud-based, when you see so much of the industry moving there. So I guess, what’s particularly unique about your product or customer base that makes it that you’re one of the few kind

A We have had our servers up in BPCs up in the cloud for a long time. And so anyone who’s interested, they can go up and for $9 an hour or – and a few clicks to initiate a server, you can deploy in the cloud today. We have lots of customers who do that. We provide a server license and they can deploy anywhere.

…Again, we did that because we know that the data is going to be hybrid for a very long time. If anyone on the call believes that all the data is going to end up in one persistence layer, in one hyperscale cloud vendor, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s going to be a hybrid world for a very long time.

…You will see something in the cloud next year. The bigger challenge is monetization of it. And does it change the go-to-market? Does it improve the TAM? Does it make it easier for our current customers to deploy the design time experience when you have broad footprints? So, there’s a lot that goes into it, but when our customers demand cloud, we will be cloud. No doubt about that.

Later in the discussion Stoecker was asked specifically about SNOW

Q…All right. Sticking on that topic, we have been getting a lot of questions on just what you think the IPO of the large cloud data warehouse company this way – this week means for Alteryx. I mean, I know, you did mention you have – working on a tech alliance with them, and clearly internally at Alteryx you’re using Alteryx as a use case alongside them. But how do you kind of see their offerings and ambitions relative? Is more growth for them good for you guys? Neutral? Just kind of curious, how you position your technology alongside theirs?

Dean Stoecker

We love what they’re doing. We think that they’ll have a fabulous IPO. We think, it creates another tailwind for us. What – as a persistence layer, what they want is compute loads. We make it easy for people to get compute load efficiency in Snowflake. We have several hundred customers, joint customers without having a partnership, without doing go-to-market execution together. And so, we’re trying to figure that one out with them

…we become the analytic pipeline to anything going into any endpoint, whether it’s SharePoint, PowerPoint, Qlik Tableau, Power BI or a write-back to a Snowflake database that can then be queried for add-on questions that are invariably going to occur in the line of business.

So evidently Stoecker believes that AYX has the bases covered. This seems responsive to the
concerns expressed in the aforementioned posts.

Evaluating Stoeckers optimism requires some deep understanding of the methods involved in developing and deploying analytical methodologies…something which I for one do not have. I pose the questions to those more learned than I

cheers

arnie

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Here is a deep dive on AYX from SoftwareStackInvesting:
https://softwarestackinvesting.com/alteryx-q2-2020-review/#m…

He believes that AYX should have a bright future if they evolve and move quickly, or they risk becoming irrelevant by Snowflake:
“So, in this regard, Snowflake isn’t a competitor to Alteryx per se, as some analysts keep asking. However, I think the right question is whether the ecosystem that Snowflake enables creates alternatives to Alteryx. That is the key consideration going forward. If enterprises continue to converge their data into a single instance on data cloud platforms, like Snowflake or even Databricks, does that supersede the position that Alteryx currently enjoys (which assumes enterprise data is in silos)?“

He sold out and bought NET with the proceeds. Before he gets back in he wants to see “tangible evidence that AYX is rapidly evolving their product offering…” He said positive signs are recent hiring in these categories and mgmt. comments.

So sounds like another layer of risk that other stocks on this board do not have.

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https://seekingalpha.com/article/4376319-alteryx-will-be-pho…

Also pertinent to this issue is a comment on Bert’s SA article by someone claiming to be in the business of data analytics.

Addressing another commenter, and not Bert directly, “Rare_Oil” wrote:

I work in one of the data analytics vendor companies. I think your preference of having a CLOUD platform is fair. But based on my experience talking to our enterprise customers (definitely some big names you should have heard), a lot of them cannot move the data analytics pipelines to the cloud due to company policy.
Moving to cloud is definitely a trend, but I’m sure a significant portion of companies are not willing to put their business data on the cloud due to security reasons. Therefore on-prem business will still thrive for those customers.

This comment supports the AYX view of matters.

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My current employer, my previous employer, and several partners of the employer before that (clients) prohibit company critical data from being cloud based.

The InfoSec policy of my current company at the moment requires data to be scrubbed for unnecessary columns and rows before a snapshot is posted for ON SITE consumption.

There are many examples of this out there.

Our policies were battened down again last year after a data breach and ransom attack occurred.

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It seems to me that the core principle here is that cloud data is accessible from on premise, but generally on premise data is not available from the cloud. If this is the case, then only from on premise is all the data accessible. The virtue of cloud deployment would only be if all the data to be analyzed were in the cloud and the analysis were conducted local to that data.

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