Thanks Saul,
I think I’m a little clearer on this . . .
I’ve been perusing the Alteryx website since I read your posts. Really interesting family of products. I guess they’ve partitioned their offering into a suite of products because of the need to address different user groups (some IT folks, some statisticians, some end user business groups, etc.) but in fact, you pretty much need everything they offer at once. It’s not like you can start with the Designer Product and 6 months later bring in the Server product and so forth. A company needs to buy everything all at once.
They skirt some important issues, most notably data quality, they acknowledge it, but don’t really address it. The old adage GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) remains true irrespective of how powerful one’s analytical tools may be. I won’t belabor this with examples, take my word for it, in my tenure in IT working predominantly with applications and information (very little experience with h/w and networks) data quality was a perennial problem. It’s my perception that a partnership with Varonis could be highly beneficial to both companies. I wonder if either company is aware of the other?
I was looking for a scaled down, individual user product, but they don’t have one. This could serve as a powerful analytical for individual investors, but alas, they don’t address the individual user audience. I couldn’t even access some of the demos and literature because I didn’t have a valid business email address (I probably could have used my former company email address, but thought it a bit dishonest).
Looking through their list of customers and industries I was surprised that I didn’t see any news, political, governmental, legal or police organization. Just one example: I’m familiar with some of the research problems associated with discovery during litigation. Often, teams of high-priced outside attorneys are hired to review mountains of documentation in search of admissible evidence. These days, the majority of this information is electronic. Even paper documents can be fed through high speed OCR readers and rendered electronic with very high accuracy. At first blush, this tool suite appears that it could save an enormous amount of man-hours spent on document reviews and investigations.
I don’t know if you looked at their investor presentation, but it’s pretty compelling. It can be viewed here: https://investor.alteryx.com/investor-home/default.aspx
In summary, I’m impressed with the products.
One more question. In that you are generally 100% invested, care to reveal what you sold in order to buy Alteryx?