Big Picture
This year’s Inspire EMEA gave us a lot to be excited about - and most prominent amongst this tide of positivity is that the general direction Alteryx are travelling in strikes me as a well-thought out strategy, and makes me excited to see where the next few years of development take us.
The new products being introduced all have one thing in common - they are focussed on the move to cloud-first tools. The user-base as it currently stands are mostly familiar with Alteryx’s desktop offerings, as well as their on-prem server products, and the capabilities that these technologies provide - and as a result any cloud-based offering has a lot of work to do in order to convince these users to move across to a cloud-based solution. However, with potential users increasingly keeping their data in the cloud, it is strategically important for Alteryx to match this trend with a cloud offering of their own.
As things stand, the new cloud products are feature-light when compared to Designer desktop for example - but it is very early days and the intent Alteryx is currently showing has to be regarded as a step in the right direction.
The New Cloud Products
Currently available:
Designer Cloud (Alteryx ETL in the cloud)
Machine Learning (Similar to the predictive tools currently in Designer desktop)
Auto Insights (Automated Insight generation - somewhat similar to Tableau’s Ask Data & Explain Data for those familiar)
Coming in the next year:
App Builder (A better experience for building and using Alteryx Apps)
Location Intelligence (Cloud-based spatial tools)
Metrics Store (Quickly & easily definable KPI tracking - somewhat similar to Tableau Server’s Metrics)
Cloud Reporting (A better experience for reporting tools in Alteryx)
Currently these products will be sold separately and are each at very different levels of maturity - due primarily to the manner in which they have been acquired and the fact they have come from different development teams - but the long-term intention is for these to be brought together into a single comprehensive cloud platform.
As was previously mentioned, these cloud offerings are not as mature as Designer Desktop and the initial objective of development will be to bring their capabilities in line with their Desktop counterparts. By way of an example, Designer Cloud currently has 20 of the myriad of ETL tools available in Designer Desktop, so there is a lot of catching up to do. But all good things have to start somewhere, and Alteryx has demonstrated that they are moving steadfastly towards a cloud-based future.
For a deeper dive into some of these new offerings see Ollie Clarke’s blog from Inspire across the pond in Denver back in May 2022.