Exclusive Interview with Gari Johnson, Senior Vice President, APJ at Alteryx

Businesses thrive on data-driven insights but who would want to miss the forest in search of a tree? For the challenges big data comes with, it is quite common to lose sight of the bigger goal. Analytics automation can save businesses valuable time and resources, by letting them automate all the manual work from data collection to generating business intelligence reports. Alteryx is a data automation platform that has been working to provide businesses with automated analytics solutions. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Gari Johnson, Senior Vice President, APJ at Alteryx.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Alteryx accelerates the end-to-end analytics process by offering the world's richest, easiest-to-use analytics automation platform.

Most recently, we announced the Alteryx Analytics Cloud, our first unified end-to-end analytics automation platform that helps businesses empower all users across the enterprise to make more informed decisions with their data. The availability of new Alteryx solutions in the cloud means users only need a browser to gain access to insights, with a setup that can be done in minutes instead of days. It also gives them the ability to:

• Extend the power of analytics beyond data scientists, IT, and data and analytics departments to lines of business groups.
• Quickly build, validate, iterate, and explore models with a visually guided user experience while learning about data science.
• Find stories, anomalies, and insights hidden deep in data, and gain clear summaries and explanations focused on what matters across the organization.
• Drive their analytics at scale and fuel digital transformation efforts by gaining timely insights from large cloud datasets.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Alteryx was founded 25 years ago to make data analytics more assessable to business users. Today, the platform supports all analytics use cases within the enterprise, is available for every data type and source, on-premises or in the cloud, is deployed across 8,000 customers globally and has an active user community of more than 320,000 members.

3. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

Traditionally, the business process for the analytical workflow would entail manual handoffs between teams, breaking the "flow" and slowing down the ability to achieve meaningful outcomes. A myriad of tools would be required to discover, prepare, and analyze data before applying data science algorithms and machine learning.

 The Alteryx analytics automation platform provides automation capabilities for functions ranging from diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive to geospatial analytics, empowering enterprises to work smarter by delivering value from data at the scale and speed of today's digital-first world.  By reducing manual processes and automating analytics, Alteryx customers can improve top-line growth and bottom-line return; increase efficiency; upskill their workforce in analytics; reduce risk; and improve the customer experience.

4. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

Global demand for data analytics is ramping, and we have strategically aligned the company's product innovation and go-to-market motion to meet this opportunity.

We are beginning to see enterprise digital transformation at a global scale, which is creating incremental opportunities across a range of new personas. This generational shift towards data literacy is creating urgency for companies to upskill their workforces to embrace data, extract insights, and unlock new opportunities to drive growth and create value.

In India, Alteryx is keen on investing in driving, fuelling, and sustaining digital transformations. Mobile technology took off in India on a positive and large scale. Akin to that all things data and digital have swept across the country pre-Covid and more so during the pandemic. Data is the new oil in this rapidly growing economy which also has one of the world's youngest and most ambitious populations, with an untiring thirst for knowledge. Data-driven decisions and data literacy is a huge focus in corporate India.

As we look to the future, we are committed to providing true end-to-end data analytics capabilities and continuing to expand our product offerings to include new cloud-based solutions.

5. How has the adoption of real-time data automation in India evolved over the last few years?

Real-time data automation is now used across sectors for various functions. To begin with, we live in a world that is now heavily dependent on digital support for everyday activities from a minute food delivery to larger bank transfers. With real-time data automation, the processing of information as it is received and replying with near accurate results is instant. The involvement of AI has cut down manual labor, increased efficiency, and made simple and complex chores accessible and easy for workers of all skill levels. Leveraging AI and ML gives insights in real-time which has helped businesses in multiple dimensions, such as forecasting or optimizing supply chain processes with faster data analytics.  The Alteryx analytics automation platform brings together the tools needed to process data in one place. These tools help automate data in real-time with increased accuracy and precision.

6. Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?

Our mission is to democratize analytics by empowering organizations to upskill every worker into a data worker.  With a market opportunity of approximately $65B across the analytics and data engineering space, projected to exceed $110B by 2025 according to IDC, we've focused our go-to-market approach to support this.

Furthermore, what makes Alteryx unique is that our solutions enable anyone in any industry, any role, or at any skill level to be more data-driven. Our innovations will bring analytics to all so every business can empower every employee to make data-informed decisions using analytics automation. 

For example, we work with HR teams who are looking to identify causes of employee churn and recruit better, and we also work with finance teams to help them close the books accurately, automate taxes and drive regulatory compliance.

Other areas that we work with include supply chain where teams use our platform to right-size inventory, optimize logistics and modernize capacity planning. Sales and marketing departments also use Alteryx to look for ways to maximize cross-sell and upsell growth.

Another area where we see tremendous precedent to grow and expand is the education sector where there is an opportunity to implement technology in recruitment, admissions, student success, and institutional advancement.

Finally, we launched Alteryx SparkED, a no-cost education program that focuses on empowering academic and individual learners in various fields to stud and develop analytic skills. SparkED  provides free renewable education software licenses, teaching materials, and learning pathways that can help develop the data skills needed for current and future employees to meet the demand.