Alteryx Embarks on User-Friendly Analytics Software
Business intelligence software provider Alteryx is setting out to help businesses derive value from ballooning stores of digital information even if their payrolls reveal a noticeable lack of data scientists. Updates to its Strategic Analytics product, which picked up enterprise cloud connectors earlier this year, are aimed at putting the power of Big Data in the hands of frontline business analysts.
Citing recent Ventana Research findings on predictive analytics, Alteryx says that 83 percent of organizations report users lack the proper skills training. Similarly, an EMC survey sounded the alarm earlier this year, revealing that enterprises are ill-prepared to make business decisions amid an influx of Big Data sources and analytics tools.
EMC discovered only a third of the 500 data science and business intelligence professionals that it polled said they were very confident about their organizations' ability to handle the business decision-making process in such an environment.
Alteryx is hoping to turn such statistics on their heads with the latest updates to its analytics platform, which it believes will resonate with organizations that are having a tough time attracting talent that can turn Big Data into relevant insights. Alteryx Strategic Analytics 7.1 “humanizes” Big Data and makes predictive analytics accessible, according to the company.
“Alteryx is Humanizing Big Data by allowing customers to integrate any type of data, including unique packaged data, and then putting the power of predictive analytics in the hands of the people who drive decisions in organizations,” said George Mathew, Alteryx president and COO, in a company release.
The software accomplishes this with a new native connector for the MongoDB database and better integration with the Hadoop distributed computing platform, says the company. With support for Hadoop deployments of Cloudera and MapR Technologies, Alteryx Strategic Analytics allows analysts to correlate Big Data with a variety of sources, including spreadsheets, data warehouses and cloud data sources.
Also new are tools that the company says will allow data workers to “quickly and easily engage in predictive analytics.” The software ships with 17 pre-packaged tools for the R statistical computing language that enable functions like Decision Trees, Lift Charts and Plot of Means.
Lastly, the software makes it easier to correlate Big Data analysis with market data sources, allowing for highly targeted and localized decision making, says Alteryx. The company pre-packages data sets from the 2010 US Census, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian Marketing Services and GPS specialist Tom Tom.
A free, 30-day trail of the software is available via the company's website.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
