Alteryx, Inc. was founded to transform how data analysts and business leaders work with data, offering them a more intuitive way to blend and analyse information. The company was established to solve the problem of the time-consuming and complex process of data preparation and analysis.
By providing a platform that simplifies data analytics, Alteryx enables users to perform advanced analytics without requiring extensive coding knowledge, thus democratising data analytics and making it accessible to a broader audience.
The company opened its offices in the UAE in 2019, however, Alteryx has been supporting MEA customers from the U.K. before that date. The company started its operations in the region in 2019.
Karl Crowther VP, MEA at Alteryx in a conversation with edge/ talks about the company and its evolution into the region.
Tell us in detail about Alteryx, and what problem does it aim to solve for?
As a leading provider of AI for enterprise analytics, Alteryx focuses on helping everyone go from data to impact, faster. The Alteryx platform provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to meet a diverse set of analytics and deployment needs.
It includes on-premise products Designer and Server, as well as the Alteryx Analytics Cloud, which is comprised of the cloud-native applications Designer Cloud, Machine Learning, Auto Insights, Location Intelligence, and App Builder.
Through the Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics, everyone can take advantage of integrated generative and conversational AI, to automate the process of data discovery, data preparation, advanced analytics, and automated reporting capabilities.
Our innovative and powerful multi-modal approach to AI-driven analytics enables every persona to leverage their tool of choice to collaborate in real-time to develop analytical insights – from chat prompts to no-code workflows and code-friendly Python and SQL notebooks – all of which can be live translated by generative IA, into a single analytical solution that enables data outcomes across the business at scale.
Reducing time to insight derived from data, lowering barriers to entry for non-technical users to extract value from data and embedding governance and security for analytics and AI in a secure and trusted environment.
We believe that analytics can empower all employees to make faster, more insightful, and more confident decisions. Our team, supported by over 400 partners, extends our services across 90 countries. With over 8,300 customers globally, including 49 per cent of Global 2000, and a community of 500,000 members, our reach and impact are substantial.
Education and skill development are also core to our mission, initiatives like SparkED and Alteryx Maveryx Community focus on upskilling individuals across over 50 countries in over 1,000 institutions. These programs have reached 170,000+ learners globally, emphasising our commitment to fostering a data-driven culture within organisations.
AI is transforming data collection and analysis, how is Alteryx on top of its game?
While data-driven intelligence will remain the cornerstone of business decision-making for the foreseeable future, accelerating those efforts through generative AI is an ideal application for this emerging technology to drive business efficiencies. UAE organisations, acknowledging the transformative impact of AI, are also deeply interested in the regulation of AI usage, driven by ethical considerations around data privacy, transparency, and governance.
With 87 per cent of UAE business leaders advocating for sector-specific AI regulations, our platform’s governance capabilities are well-aligned with these needs. It allows for controlled access and transparent data flow, ensuring responsible AI implementation that aligns with emerging regulatory frameworks.
With the growing involvement of various roles in data handling – from establishing pipelines to analysing insights – governing how data is used becomes critical. As many organisations know, cloud-based data lakes, data warehouses and data lakehouses offer infinite scalability and better governance to support your data storage and processing needs.
Whether on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid, users should be able to transform their data without understanding the environments that exist in their organisation. The Alteryx Platform simplifies how organisations access, analyse, and gain insights from data.
The Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics blends generative AI technologies into the analytics stack.
Reducing time to insight derived from data and lowering barriers to entry for non-technical users to extract value from data.
Our innovative and powerful multi-modal approach to AI-driven analytics enables every persona to leverage their tool of choice to collaborate in real-time to develop analytical insights – from chat prompts to no-code workflows and code-friendly Python and SQL notebooks – all of which can be live translated by generative IA, into a single analytical solution that enables data outcomes across the business at scale.
Empowering every data worker and decision maker -regardless of their analytic experience -with automated data preparation, AI-powered analytics, and approachable machine learning — all with embedded governance and security After all, it is easier to train people from say the accounting department in the use of AI than to train AI experts in accounting.
Could you share an anecdote with us?
Dubai International Airport (DXB) completely reimagined its passenger demand forecasting using analytics and the Alteryx Platform. Through its use of the Alteryx Platform, DXB Airport developed a dynamic workflow that combined sensor and camera data from their Airport Operations Control Center with real-time flight arrival information.
This innovative approach enabled the airport to anticipate passenger load profiles and adjust resource allocation accordingly. The use of Alteryx Designer was pivotal in managing crucial aspects like Passenger Demand and Counter Supply. By ensuring that these workflows were updated every five minutes, the airport maintained a near real-time grasp on passenger flow and delivered 40 per cent improvements in passenger wait times over two years.
Dubai International Airport’s experience with Alteryx illustrates the transformative power of data analytics in operational efficiency. Being one of the world’s busiest airports, it had faced the challenge of managing fluctuating passenger flows at immigration and security checkpoints. The airport needed a solution that could adapt to rapid changes in passenger volume, which could shift from sparse to crowded in a matter of minutes.
Tell us about the technology and its workings?
At a very high level, the Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics provides a single unified platform for an organisation to manage its data and analytics automation to drive intelligent decisions across the enterprise.
Underpinning our platform is a set of technological innovations that make robust data analytics easy through an in-memory engine, sophisticated analytic models, and an open and modular core.
Our enterprise grade platform architecture allows deployment of analytics solutions on hyperscalers, including Amazon Web Services, or AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, or GCP, and is enabling our customers to upskill millions of underserved data workers to drive better business results.
Our native data connection capabilities can unlock the data housed in customer cloud data warehouses, cloud data lakes, and on-premise databases. Our platform supports native integrations with major cloud vendors, including Snowflake, AWS Redshift, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Azure Synapse, and our Open Database Connectivity/Java Database Connectivity architecture allows customers to bring their own data provider.
The Alteryx Platform empowers “analytics for all” by delivering easy, end-to-end automation of data engineering, analytics, reporting, machine learning, or ML, and data science through over 300 drag and drop analytic tools.
Our platform also supports native tools to access data through application programming interface, or API, endpoints directly or by leveraging our Python software development kit to build connectors to meet every enterprise’s unique needs. Our no-code, low-code approach, AI-assisted visual workflows, and intuitive drag-and-drop interface make sophisticated capabilities accessible, reducing tedious, time-consuming manual tasks to a few mouse-clicks while eliminating the need to write complex software code.
What are the learnings you have incorporated and what are the first principles you kept in mind?
Our market position as an analytics orchestrator across an increasingly fragmented data ecosystem is highly differentiated, and the need for data analytics at scale, with governance and security, is rising.
As we continue to evolve our offerings and infuse AI into the Alteryx Platform, we are focused on deeply integrating generative AI capabilities to help organisations incorporate custom business data into LLMs in a governed manner to drive operational agility and deliver competitive advantage.
Our innovation and technology areas of focus remain an easy-to-use analytics experience that is tech stack agnostic while leveraging generative AI to open new use cases and empower more people to unlock value from data.
How are you competing with the global tech giants in the space, what is your USP?
Alteryx powers analytics for all by providing the market leading AI platform for enterprise analytics. What truly separates Alteryx from every other vendor is the ease of use of our solutions. Alteryx enables everyone from finance to HR and IT to engineering to learn more about and use analytics to solve business problems in hours and days vs. months and years.
We help organisations automate their data and analytics processes and improve their data-driven decisioning, analytics self-service, and data literacy. These high impact outcomes are made possible with our unique combination of easy-to-use, end-to-end and enterprise-grade capabilities that support every stage of the journey from raw data to business outcomes with:
- Integrated generative and conversational AI.
- Data preparation and ELT/ELT.
- Advanced analytics, data science, and geospatial analytics.
- Machine Learning, Auto Insights, Location Intelligence, and App Builder.
- Reporting and workflow automation.
The platform’s AI capabilities are powered by AiDIN. It is the Alteryx engine that uses AI, machine learning, and generative AI across our award-winning enterprise analytics platform to improve automation opportunities and accelerate value creation.
AiDIN reduces manual efforts, provides recommendations, and makes analysis faster and easier than ever. It includes a chat-based experience in Copilot (coming soon) as well as LLM tuning and management in AI Studio.
We know there are risks and challenges associated with generative AI – such as privacy, security, and governance concerns. This is why Alteryx AiDIN presents the optimal solution for our customers to harness the power of generative AI, within a highly secure enterprise-grade analytics platform with integrated governance.
Our capabilities are accessed through our desktop and on-premises products, Designer and Server, and our cloud applications that comprise the Alteryx Analytics Cloud. This gives Alteryx customers the flexibility to address the same business problems with cloud, hybrid or on-premise deployments.
Alteryx desktop and cloud applications and experiences are unified by our Cloud Connected capabilities. The Alteryx AI Platform includes a rich set of enterprise-grade platform services that include:
APIs and 150+ connectors and integrations for your files, applications, and data warehouses—think Snowflake, Databricks, AWS and more—connect to every system that contains data you need to analyse and that requires insights to run your business.
- Scheduling, orchestration, and automation.
- Security and governance throughout.
- Collaboration and versioning capabilities.
Our rich ecosystem of service and technology partners and a marketplace for accessing extensions and add-ons.
What key trends and shifts you see shortly?
As business leaders strive to take advantage of this era of decision intelligence, the focus for every sector in 2024 will be on harnessing AI’s power for business value by making AI-driven decision-making accessible and secure for the entire workforce. Despite this clear trajectory to data maturity, though, many organisations just aren’t able unlock the full potential of their data to ensure it drives business value, even as it continues to grow in volume and variety. According to the European Commission, 80 per cent of the data collected in the industry remains unused.
Globally, one of the most prominent trends is the rise of generative AI, which is set to revolutionise decision-making processes. In 2023, generative AI was touted for its potential to accelerate data-driven insights and empower employees to stay ahead of the curve.
By 2024, the focus will be on leveraging AI for business value, making AI-driven decision-making accessible and secure for the entire workforce. In the UAE, Alteryx’s research reveals significant trends in technology investment among business leaders. About 59 per cent plan to increase their investment in advanced technology, with 82 per cent acknowledging the substantial impact of AI on their organisations.
Furthermore, 45 per cent are set to invest in AI and other advanced technologies in response to evolving market dynamics, highlighting the growing emphasis on technological advancement in strategic business planning. A recent survey by Alteryx among data leaders indicated that a primary driver for adopting generative AI is to predict business performance and industry trends.
While technology is set to shape how future enterprises operate and perform, preparing for this increasingly complex, data-driven future requires a focus on skill transformation within the workforce. Beyond technology, people remain key to the success of AI.
Embracing upskilling in data analytics and machine learning across an organisation remains the catalyst for driving the path towards sustained business growth and success. Therefore, the organisations that will flourish will be the ones that have nurtured and equipped their domain experts with essential critical thinking, domain knowledge, data literacy, and analytical skills to navigate this era of AI-driven intelligence.
What are your plans?
With the amount of data set to continually grow in size and complexity, the capability to capture, process and analyse these vast volumes for data-driven intelligence will remain the cornerstone of business decision-making for the foreseeable future. Hence, companies and the people who run them will always be drawn to things that help them make smarter – and faster – decisions.
In the years ahead, we’ll continue to see analytics become more in demand, automation more critical and the need for accessibility and scalability crucial for delivering decision intelligence at speed.
As businesses look to exploit this era of intelligence, Alteryx is committed to an innovative future, ensuring data-driven decisions are withing reach of every user, every team, and every step of the way.
