Alteryx, a leader in Analytics Process Automation (APA), recently held a Virtual Analyst Summit for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. The summit was hosted by Gerry Van Zandt, Senior Director, Analyst Relations. From Quadrant Knowledge Solutions (QKS), the summit was attended by Pranjal Singh (Analyst) and Apoorva Dawalbhakta (Senior Analyst).
Julian Quinn, Senior VP, APJ, kicked off the event with an interesting presentation on the vision and strategy of Alteryx in the Asia Pacific and Japan region. I was happy to learn that despite the worldwide uncertainties amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a good year for Alteryx in terms of revenue. Alteryx had signed more than ten major strategic alliances in the last 12 months and has more than 7200 global customers.
Following Quinn was Jordan Barker, Director, Solutions Engineering. During his address, Barker gave an example of a tax accountant who works on Excel, and manual processes were part of his work. A one-hour session of Alteryx gave the accountant the ‘superpower’ to transform regulatory reporting into an automated process and allowed him to move on to advanced analytics, Barker noted. Additionally, Jordan established their four important pillars – Knowledge Workers, Analysts, Data Engineers, and IT teams as ‘Superheroes’ who are involved in transforming processes. These superheroes are – the knowledge workers who automate analytics and enable better reporting, the analysts who create complex analytical workloads, and manage the creation and development of an analytical application, data engineers who manage upstream and downstream ETL processes to create analytical datasets for knowledge workers and analysts, and finally the IT team that helps in reporting, visualizing, governing, and upgrading the analytical workloads produced by the analysts.
Barker also spoke about Alteryx’s future roadmap to improve governance, security, and scheduling. According to Barker, ‘The latest iteration of Alteryx designer and Intelligence suite has the ability to execute natural language processing, optical character recognition, and speed up the text mining that allows end-users to extract data from semi-structured and image files. Additionally, they are also adding automated feature engineering that accelerates the ‘data to insights’ lifecycle’.
Chris Logie, Manager of Marketing Analytics at Deakin University, a major public university in the state of Victoria in South-Eastern Australia narrated an inspirational story about how Alteryx tools helped his team. Initially, Chris had hired a person who held a doctorate in philosophy. While he did not have a mathematical background but was good at problem-solving and communicating. He started using Alteryx tools and with the help of these tools, he picked up the work within weeks and was doing more sophisticated work than trained analysts. Later, he told Chris that he had a friend who also held a Ph.D. in philosophy and was smarter than him. When they met the person, he told them that he had completed an online Alteryx course because he heard that Alteryx products were used at Deakin, and he had completed a project within three months that had a roadmap of 18 months by integrating data from the system using Alteryx. By the end of this story, Chris remarked, “Alteryx itself is an upscaling tool”.
Another customer who spoke at the summit was Brad Kane, Manager of Procurement Analytics at the Department of Planning Industry and Environment for the Government of New South Wales, also in South-Eastern Australia. Kane’s department handles finance-related data, payroll data, HR-related data, and property and lease management. They picked Alteryx because it is a collaboration-based tool. It can quickly pick up the disparate data sets, curate them, make sure that the data is accurate, he said.
Another Alteryx customer Sandeep Bisawa, Executive Director of Client Coverage, Performance Management, and Analytics at Standard Chartered Bank, Singapore, also spoke at the summit. Describing his role, he mentioned that their department supports the onboarding of large corporate, institutional clients like Google, and Amazon. Additionally, Standard Chartered Bank performs operations like KYC, credit documentation, collateral management, financial market contract negotiations, loan documentations, digital onboarding account opening, and maintenance. All these operations are handled by more than 4000 relationship managers and credit analysts. The Standard Chartered Bank collaborated with Alteryx to build an analytics platform portal to maintain the massive amounts of data produced by all the teams. The portal is used by thousands of employees in almost all sectors, as it provides dashboards helping teams to have a visual representation with various insights around business performance indicators. Dashboards also provide a view of the trends and insights about client revenues from a risk perspective and opportunities.
All the stories, challenges, and examples given by these three customers truly showed off the extent of the transformational impact of Alteryx products.
Additionally, in continuation with Alteryx Virtual APJ Analyst Briefing, they have an ‘Alteryx Inspire’ event in which they introduced the Global SparkED Education Program to empower educators, and students to upskill with data and analytics. The Alteryx SparkED initiative includes free resources like software training, certifications, and teaching materials to expand data science skills across learners. Alteryx at Global Inspire Conference also introduced new tools like Alteryx Machine Learning, Intelligence Suite, Designer Cloud, and Unified Platform APK.
Another announcement made by Mark Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Alteryx, is Alteryx Ventures, their first strategic venture fund company, that will help start-ups in creating unique technology in the space of analytics and data science. All in all, this lineup of events has got me excited, and I can’t wait to attend such events in the future and be part of more impactful analyst meets like these.
About the Author
Pranjal Singh is working as an Analyst with Quadrant Knowledge Solutions. He tracks the global markets for Data Analytics & AI.
