All Amped Up! A recap of Alteryx Inspire 2019

When you’ve had the pleasure of working with Alteryx software, attending its annual Inspire conference is a no brainer. This was my third Alteryx conference and I’d say the best I’ve attended. It’s not because of the gorgeous venue, the Gaylord Opry Resort in Nashville, TN with its incredible architecture, myriad of waterfalls, beautiful gardens, lighting and great restaurants. It wasn’t even the pretty cool swag you get at Inspire either. The real deal about Inspire is you take away so much knowledge of how you can use the Alteryx tools better, understand deeply how different companies leverage it, meet people that are enthusiastic about sharing their experience, ideas and challenges and also, meet with the developers to troubleshoot workflow issues, recommend enhancements and provide feedback. When the conference is over, you feel quite invincible.

Now if you don’t understand all the exuberance around Alteryx, perhaps you haven’t had the great pleasure of stringing multiple Microsoft Access databases together to store enough data locally to do business forecasting analysis. Or perhaps you’ve never had to create 15 different excel workbook packages for 15 different executives because each wants their own piece of the world with their own metrics and analyses. Or maybe, you were like me years ago while working in finance, working late every month waiting for the financial systems to process the month-end transactions so as to close the books for the month after which we would download tons of data to prepare reconciliations to get the books ready for the official monthly revenue and profit numbers. You may have tried to take your analytics capabilities to the next level by deploying one of the big statistical enterprise platforms to build models for business use, only to get frustrated that the models took forever to build and not even get deployed due to difficulty integrating with business processes. These business-critical tasks usurped hours and hours of time and induced stress due to the tedious and often repetitious nature of the work, leaving little time to do the real work of analysis and proffering solutions.

Then comes Alteryx.

You see, the first time I witnessed a demo of the software back in August of 2015, my response was how can I get this right now. If you’ve been in my shoes, deciding what technologies a business should adopt within its portfolio, you will know that there are many demos that just fall flat on their face. Their use case is foggy or implementation complicated. For some that you actually accept to deploy, that nagging feeling of being left with the empty handbag can be so frustrating. It’s hard to not feel jaded after doing this for a few years.

Not with Alteryx. It’s applicability hit the nail on the head.

No lengthy implementation cycles, with benefits right out the door and solutions in minutes. These are benefits that affect the business immediately and are scalable too. Whether you’re an analyst or an architect, the Alteryx portfolio of tools has something for you that makes ETL, data cleansing, process automation, model creation and comparison or application development such a breeze. It’s very common to hear, “this is incredible” or “I can’t believe how I’ve lived without this for so long”, interjected with a few French adjectives and superlatives not safe for print, if you get my drift. Sigh! The thrill of solving!!!

Wait? This article is about the conference so let’s get back to that.

With registration in the bag on Sunday afternoon, the first 2 days of the conference were dedicated to deep platform learning of the four Alteryx products (Designer, Server, Connect and Promote) at varying levels from beginner to expert. Most of the classes were sold out and since I registered late for the Advanced Analytics course of almost 200 registrants, I was counting on at least one person not showing up. Determined to make it into the class, I asked if I could sign up if it was clear that a registered person does not show up. After the course had commenced, just about 8 seats remained empty so with patience, I managed to get in, so don’t give up if you ever find yourself in this situation. The courses had excellent tutors from Alteryx which made a long day in class go by very quickly. It was nice to see different camps of attendees congregate between breaks to chat about ideas they could implement immediately with their new learnings too.

If you preferred not to spend all day in class, you could sign up for Alteryx Build, where you would spend the day working on a project alongside others or solo focused on projects for data scientists, developers or Alteryx For Good (AFG) inclined solvers to put your analytical skills towards a worthy cause. Regardless of your choices, there were 19 sessions on Monday and 35 sessions on Tuesday to choose from, however most of which required pre-registration fees to be assured a seat. All the sessions were scattered around the several ballrooms in the Delta wing of the hotel with drinks and snacks available in between breaks. Pretty good breakfast and lunch were served each day too. Evenings were spent hanging out with new friends on the hotel premise, talking about data, analytics and automation, both with other customers and Alteryx leadership. Others hit the town exploring the local social scenes and restaurants. This is Nashville, the music city we’re talking about.

Wednesday and Thursday were mainly dedicated to customer led sessions, sharing their unique use cases or tips an tricks they’ve learnt along the way. There were also round table deliberations on how to make your voice heard in the community as well as industry specific user group meetings. I signed up for a very intriguing session called Legolytics: Creating a LEGO Masterpiece using Alteryx. Initially, this felt like a nice experiment but as Ben Moss went into details of how he used Alteryx to create an image of his dad using Lego pieces, we were all blown away at the creativity that went into it, triggering ideas of what else we could do. The whole process he described involved web scraping, price optimization and macro development all, of which would enable you create the masterpiece cheaper than ordering it from LEGO! Of course, you’ll still have to put the Lego pieces together yourself!!

Another great presentation was from Michael Byars who walked us through his brilliant presentation on how Alteryx keeps American Airlines soaring. I’ve worked briefly in the aviation industry and know how splintered and diverse data can be, especially around scheduling, so when the highlight mentioned how schedule processing times were reduced by 99%, I was all ears. After walking us through what schedule analysis is and explaining what turn files were, we could appreciate the incredible work he had done in just a year of using Alteryx to reduce schedule processing times from 30 hours of manual processing in Excel to 45 mins incorporating Excel VBA, which is much better but not great. But using Alteryx, they were able to process 90% more data and do that all within 8 minutes!! As if that was not enough, he introduced us to the concept of iterative batch macros. Most of us Alteryx users are familiar with either batch or iterative macros, but an iterative batch macro, that’s novel. An iterative macro that can turn on or off different batch macros based on embedded logic and signals from the underlying data. How cool is that?

Unlike other conferences I have attended, the keynote address commenced on Wednesday. The theme was “Step into the Spotlight,” with CEO and Chairman, Dean Stoecker walking us through Alteryx’s analytical journey of success and the many milestones the company has accomplished over the years, while trying not to be distracted by his blingy star-studded belt. Ashley Kramer, SVP of Product Management came after to talk about customer successes and a preview of what is to come in the version just released and the beta product. Judging from the response of the over 4,500 attendees in the hall, it’s safe to say, we were in agreement with where the company is going. The platform generally has a new look and feel that is very aesthetic and some of the ideas users have been pressing on the development team have been brought in nicely. For the hardcore programmers, they can now bring in entire python scripts embedded in jupyter notebooks in addition to R which has been a part of the application for years. One particular mention was Designer Express, a web-based version of Alteryx run in the browser, primed for cloud and non cloud -based technologies and who knows what else. Some really cool additions coming soon.

Time will not let me tell you about the Grand Prix, an Alteryx tradition of watching some of best minds in the Alteryx community duke it out live on stage, racing to see who can complete an unknown challenge in Alteryx. Or the UX Lab, where attendees can see what the future looks like by testing and providing feedback on new features. Or the Alternation arena, where attendees can mingle with Alteryx partner companies showcasing their expertise or picking up swag from the Alternation store (I got to screen print my own custom t-shirt while there). These are better experienced than told.

Let me end with bestseller author, Malcolm Gladwell’s guest keynote speech. If you haven’t read any of his books, I don’t know how, but you need to read them to appreciate the brilliance that oozes from him. As a true self-professed nerd, his speech was centered on questioning the metrics used to determine the top-ranking schools in the US. He walked us through what underlying data was used, the weightings given to the different criteria used and explained why the current methodology should be challenged, all with tables and figures. He then attempted, with the limited information less influenced by bias, to re-score the school rankings using a more data driven approach.

Personally, I was struck by the compulsion of his delivery to make us think. Think about the data we use to create analyses that spur us to make decisions because decisions change lives. The decisions we make can have far reaching consequences. We hear the term data-driven all the time, but do we really understand what that means or what it takes? Do you just accept what is available or do you dig deeper, further, broader, looking for real insights and not just what might tell a nice story? These thoughts raced through my mind as he delivered such a simple but powerful message, a message that ties in well with the ethos of Alteryx. I’ll leave you with a thought provoking line from his speech;

“what assumptions are you using to judge the things around you?”