What does Alteryx do?

The data cleaning and manipulation tool for the people

The TL;DR

Alteryx is a group of tools that helps business teams get insights out of their data, without needing to write any code.

• Business data is messy and disorganized, and needs to be moved and cleaned to get value out of it

• But specialized data teams are a scarce resource, especially at larger companies

• Alteryx helps non-technical teams move, clean, and analyze their own data, without needing to code

• Alteryx started with a straightforward workflow builder tool, but has expanded to a lot of other analytics-related products since then

Sound like any other number of tools you’ve seen in the data space? That’s because it is! But it didn’t used to be; Alteryx started back in the 90’s with a pretty neat, and unique at the time, data cleaning tool. But more on that later.

Data is messy and disorganized: the need for ETL

If you’ve been reading Technically for a while, you’ll be familiar with the fundamental fact that the data you need is usually not the data you have. Imagine you’re part of a marketing team, and you want some insight into how one of your recent campaigns is doing. Easy, right? Not so fast. The data you need is all over the place, physically:

• Form signups and whitepaper downloads from HubSpot

• Web traffic data collected via Segment in your data warehouse

• Paid search data from Google in AdWords

• …the list goes on

So first, you’ll need to get all of this data into one place so you can analyze it together. But before then, you’ve got another issue: the data is dirty, and needs to be cleaned before you can use it. A few examples: