Alteryx Announces a New Version of Its Analytics Platform
Alteryx today released the latest version of its analytics platform, which delivers a number of new capabilities, chief among them the expansion of the Visualytics feature.
Introduced last year, Visualytics is part of Alteryx Designer, the company’s self-service data analytics product. By providing real-time, interactive visualizations across the Alteryx platform, Visualytics aims to enable data workers to easily visualize and understand their data throughout the entire analytics workflow. The new release sees the introduction of two new Visualytics tools: an interactive chart tool and an insight tool.
“These are drag-and-drop tools intended for the analyst and citizen data scientist, so they can drag these tools onto the Designer workspace and essentially engage the Visualytics features,” says Greg Davoll, vice president of product marketing at Alteryx.
The interactive chart tool enables users to easily create Visualytics outputs, such as charts and graphs, that can be shared in different ways. “Prior to this, we had capabilities in our product that would allow for some static reports and graphs, but this [the interactive chart tool] introduces an interactive capability within the analytic workflow, which is really important to our customers,” Davoll says. “It allows them to essentially stay within the user interface and the development environment they’re in when they’re building the analytic workflows and get much deeper insights into the data—not only what it looks like but what it means—without having to export the data into a staging area or some intermediate. It facilitates the development and allows them to get to an innovative output more quickly.”
The insight tool allows analysts to create dashboards that combine multiple interactive charts and then share them with others. “It essentially allows you to combine multiple interactive charts into a dashboard. It’s all within the platform, so it keeps our customers in the place they already are without having to go through any special gymnastics to export, massage, and stage data. It’s all now within the Alteryx platform and much easier to work with,” Davoll says.
The new release also includes a caching capability that can streamline the analytical process when problems occur. “Imagine a workflow that has 35 steps to it. Prior to caching, when you run a workflow…that 35-step workflow could take, say, 55 minutes to run start to finish. Let’s say you’re at step 30 and something happens that you didn’t want to happen, like the data changed in a way that you didn’t intend for it to change,” Davoll says. “You can now set breakpoints along the way and change step 30 and instead of running from the beginning and starting over and having to wait 55 minutes to get to the answer, you can start at the last breakpoint that you set, which could be step 28, and then run from that point forward.”