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>> Okay, we're kicking off
the program with our first segment.
Jay Henderson is the vice president
of product management at Alteryx.
And we're going to talk about the trends and data
where we came from, how we got here, where we're going.
We got some launch news.
Hello, Jay, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Great to be here.
Really excited to share
some of the things we're working on.
>> Yeah, thank you.
So look, you have a deep product background,
product management, product marketing.
You've done strategy work.
You've been around software and data your entire career,
and we're seeing the collision of software,
data, cloud, machine intelligence.
Let's start with the customer
and maybe we can work back from there.
So if you're an analytics
or a data executive at an organization,
Jay, what's your north star?
Where are you trying to take your company
from a data and analytics point of view?
>> Yeah, I mean, look,
I think all organizations are really
struggling to get insights out of their data.
I think one of the things that we see is you've
got digital exhaust creating large volumes of data.
Storage is really cheap,
so it doesn't cost them much to keep it.
And that results in a situation where the organization's
drowning in data, but somehow still starving for insights.
And so I think, you know, when I talk to customers,
they're really excited to figure out
how they can put analytics in the hands of every
single person in their organization,
and really start to democratize the analytics
and you know, let the business users
and the whole organization get value
out of all that data they have.
>> And we're going to dig into that throughout this program.
And data, I like to say is plentiful.
Insights, not always so much.
Tell us about your launch today, Jay.
And thinking about the trends that just highlighted,
the direction that your customers want to go,
and the problems that you're solving.
What role does the cloud play,
and what is what you're launching,
how does that fit in?
>> Yeah, we're really excited
today we're launching the Alteryx analytics cloud.
That's really a portfolio of cloud-based solutions
that have all been built
from the ground up to be cloud native,
and to take advantage of things like browser based access.
So that it's really easy to give anyone access
including folks on a Mac.
It also lets you take advantage of elastic compute,
so that you can do, you know,
in database processing and cloud native solutions
that are going to scale to solve the most complex problems.
So we've got a portfolio of solutions,
things like designer cloud,
which is our flagship designer product
in a browser and on the cloud.
We've got Alteryx machine learning
which helps up-skill, regular, old analyst,
with advanced machine learning capabilities.
We've got auto insights,
which brings business users into the fold
and automatically unearths insights
using AI and machine learning.
And we've got our latest edition which is Trifacta,
that helps data engineers do data pipelining,
and really, you know,
create a lot of the underlying data sets
that are used in some of this downstream analytics.
>> So let's dig into some of those roles,
if we could a little bit.
I mean, traditionally Alteryx
has served the the business analysts,
and that's what designer cloud is fit for, I believe.
And you've explained kind of the scope.
Sorry, you've expanded that scope
into the to the business user with Hyper Anna.
And in a moment,
we're going to talk to Adam Wilson and Suresh,
about Trifacta.
And that recent acquisition takes you
as you said into the data engineering space and IT,
but in thinking about the business analyst role,
what's unique about designer cloud
and how does it help these individuals?
>> Yeah, I mean, really I go back to some of the feedback
we've had from our customers which is, you know,
they oftentimes have dozens
or hundreds of seats of our designer desktop product.
Really as they look to take the next step,
they're trying to figure out,
how do I give access to that,
those types of analytics
to thousands of people within the organization.
And designer cloud is really great for that.
You've got the browser based interface.
So if folks are on a Mac,
they can really easily just
pop open the browser and get access
to all of those prep and blend capabilities
to a lot of the analysis we're doing.
It's a great way to scale up access to the analytics
and start to put it
in the hands of really anyone in the organization,
not just those highly skilled power users.
>> Okay, great.
So now then you add in the Hyper Anna acquisition.
So now you're targeting the business user,
Trifacta comes into the mix,
that deeper IT angle that we talked about.
How does this all fit together?
How should we be thinking about the new Alteryx portfolio?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty exciting.
When you think about democratizing analytics
and providing access
to all these different groups of people,
you've not been able to do it through one platform before.
It's not going to be one interface
that meets the needs of all these
different groups within the organization,
you really do need purpose built
specialized capabilities for each group.
And finally today
with the announcement of the Alteryx analytics cloud,
we brought together all of those different capabilities,
all of those different interfaces
into a single end to end application.
So, really finally delivering
on the promise of providing analytics to all.
>> How much of this have you been able to share
with your customers and maybe your partners?
I mean, I know all this is fairly new
but have you been able to get any feedback from them?
What are they saying about it?
>> Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing.
We ran early access and limited availability program,
that let us put a lot of this technology
in the hands of over 600 customers.
>> Oh, wow.
>> Over the last few months.
So we have gotten a lot of feedback.
I tell you,
it's been overwhelmingly positive.
I think organizations are really excited
to unlock the insights that have been
hidden in all this data they've got.
They're excited to be able to use analytics
in every decision that they're making
so that the decisions they have are more informed
and produce better business outcomes.
And this idea that they're going to move from, you know,
dozens to hundreds or thousands of people
who have access to these kinds of capabilities,
I think has been a really exciting thing
that is going to accelerate the transformation
that these customers are on.
>> That's good.
Those are good numbers for a preview mode.
Let's talk a little bit about vision.
So if democratizing data is the ultimate goal,
which frankly has been elusive for most organizations.
Over time, how's your cloud going to address
the challenges of putting data
to work across the entire enterprise?
>> Yeah, I mean, I tend to think about the future
and some of the investments we're making in our products
and our roadmap across four big themes.
And these are really kind of enduring themes
that you're going to see us making investments
in over the next few years.
The first is having cloud centricity.
The data gravity has been moving to the cloud.
We need to be able to provide access,
to be able to ingest and manipulate that data,
to be able to write back to it to provide cloud solutions.
So, the first one is really around cloud centricity.
The second is around big data fluency.
Once you have all of that data
you need to be able to manipulate it in a performant manner.
So, having the elastic cloud infrastructure
and in-database processing is so important.
The third is around making AI a strategic advantage.
So, you know, getting everyone involved in accessing AI
and machine learning to unlock those insights,
getting it out of the hands of the small
group of data scientists,
putting it in the hands of analysts and business users.
And then the fourth thing is really
providing access across the entire organization,
IT and data engineers,
as well as business owners and analysts.
So, cloud centricity, big data fluency,
AI as a strategic advantage,
and personas across the organization,
are really the the four big themes you're going to see us
working on over the next few months and coming years.
>> That's good, thank you for that.
So on a related question,
how do you see the data organizations evolving?
I mean, traditionally you've had, you know
monolithic organizations, very specialized,
or I might even say hyper specialized roles.
And your mission, of course, as the customer,
you and your customers,
they want to democratize the data.
And so, it seems logical that domain leaders
are going to take more responsibility
for data life cycles, for data ownerships,
low code becomes more important.
And perhaps there's kind of challenges
the historically highly centralized
and really specialized roles that I just talked about.
How do you see that evolving,
and what role will Alteryx play?
>> Yeah, I think we'll see sort of a more
federated system start to emerge.
Those centralized groups are going to continue to exist,
but they're going to start to empower
in a much more decentralized way,
the people who are closer to the business problems
and have better business understanding.
I think that's going to let
the centralized highly skilled teams work on
problems that are of higher value to the organization.
The kinds of problems where
one or 2% lift in the model
result in millions of dollars a day for the business.
And then by pushing some of the analytics out
closer to the edge and closer to the business,
you'll be able to, you know,
apply those analytics in every single decision.
So I think you're going to see
both the decentralized and centralized model
start to work in harmony in a little bit more of a,
almost a federated sort of way.
And I think the exciting thing
for us at Alteryx is, you know, we want to facilitate that.
We want to give analytic capabilities and solutions
to both groups and types of people.
We want to help them collaborate better,
and drive business outcomes
with the analytics they're using.
>> Yeah, I mean, I think my take on it,
I wonder if you could comment is,
to me the technology should be an operational detail.
And it has been
the dog that wags the tail or maybe the other way around.
You mentioned digital exhaust before.
I mean, essentially it's digital exhaust
coming out of operational systems that then it somehow
eventually end up in the hand of the domain users.
And I wonder if increasingly
we're going to see those domain users,
those line of business experts get more access,
that's your goal.
And then even go beyond analytics,
start to build data products that could be monitized.
And that maybe it's going to take a decade to play out,
but that is sort of a new era of data.
Do you see it that way?
>> Absolutely.
We're actually making big investments
in our products and capabilities
to be able to create analytic applications,
and to enable somebody who's an analyst or a business user
to create an application
on top of the data and analytics layers that they have,
really to help democratize the analytics,
to help pre-package some of the analytics
that can drive more insights.
So I think that's definitely
a trend we're going to see more of.
>> Yeah, and to your point,
if you confederate the governance and automate that...
>> Yep.
Absolutely. >> Then that can happen.
I mean, that's a key part of it, obviously, so...
>> Yep.
>> All right, Jay, we have to leave it there.
Up next, we take a deep dive into the Alteryx
recent acquisition of Trifacta with Adam Wilson,
who led Trifacta for more than seven years,
and Suresh Vittal,
who is the chief product officer at Alteryx,
to explain the rationale behind the acquisition,
and how it's going to impact customers.
Keep it right there.
You're watching theCUBE,
your leader
in enterprise tech coverage.
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