In my lay-person opinion, a data science tool (AYX) that is slightly better than it’s competitors (KNIME and others), as asserted by the author, would still have a moat if the difference in its capabilities solves the analytics problem that it’s competitors does not. Although KNIME is an open source tool whose cost is free, if it doesn’t solve the analytics problems AYX solves, it would seem that AYX is still superior, especially in enterprise-wide situations that require more horsepower and capability. Feels like a similar attempt to impact the share price like what was done to ZS yesterday.
Who among the participants of Saul’s beyond fantastic message board consider themselves in the know re: data science tools to the point of responding to the assertions made by the author of the above article on SA?
I was at Tableau Conference last year, and Alteryx had the largest booth there and were one of the biggest sponsors. So I agree with the SA article that the two compliment each other. However I did attend one session where Tableau was talking about their new tools for transforming data. This is the ETL portion that the SA article was talking about. And the article is correct that often data comes at you in a manner that is not suitable for analysis and you need to wrangle that data into a data set that you can analyze. From my limited experience this is often more work than the analysis part itself.
With Tableau being bought by Salesforce I’d say that Tableau’s capabilities are likely to expand further still. But that is pure conjecture on my part.
In general my feelings about a product like an Alteryx is that those functionalities will eventually get gobbled up into their host environments, like Tableau. I would agree their moat will evaporate. I don’t know if it will be “quick” or not. What a company like an Alteryx needs to do is recognize their moat will never be indefinite and that they need to constantly shift and expand in new directions.
I see Alteryz as a 21st century Infomatica. It does all the ETL processing you would want (even though it doesn’t have all the traditional ETL tools), plus is super easy to integrate to whatever visualization tool you want (eg Tableau).
I hear Alteryx described as a data blending, data mining, and predictive analytics tool.
It’s for sure, IMHO, that Tableau will try to expand into the data wrangling space. I guess right now they’re frenemies as neither does all of what many companies want.
Feels like a similar attempt to impact the share price like what was done to ZS yesterday.
Except that OTR Global apparantly sells their reports/ratings to hedge funds (potential for high impact on market price) and this is a random article from a total unknown amateur analyst according to his/her own bio on Seeking Alpha (no market moving potential at all).
Anyway, I don’t know if Cramer has read the article, but he (still) thinks Alteryx is a buy (suggesting that you take advantages on general market pullbacks, though).
So here you go, a full 9 minutes of pure AYX-hype if someone is in the mood for some confirmation bias to shake of any worries “Value Kicker” (the name says it all) might have caused with his/her analysis.