Editor’s Note: We’re excited to have ThoughtSpot, an Alteryx Alliances Partner, contribute to our blog. Kendrick Heath, Americas Vice President of Solution Engineering at ThoughtSpot, shares how to drive analytics at scale with ThoughtSpot and Alteryx.
The most successful companies today are committed to not just leveraging their data but doing so at scale in a way that makes granular insights accessible to every employee. In doing so, they’re changing their trajectory, embracing the future, and unleashing incredible value for their organization.
At Beyond 2020 next week, I’ll be sharing what it takes to administer analytics at scale, and why companies need to think about three pillars: technology, data, and access. Here’s a preview of what to expect.
Everything is Relative
To drive analytics at scale, a company must provide the right technology to create, curate, and augment the right data and provide access to the right people who can effect change.
I can imagine what many of you are thinking: “Really, is this all you got?”
Obviously, every company in the world has been striving to achieve analytics at scale for ages. What constitutes scale, however, is relative. And now I’m going to age myself … I developed green bar reports! I made the best green bar reports and was providing analytics at the scale of how much paper we had in the printer. Was that true scale? No, but it was analytics at some scale. And for the time, that was what was possible.
Is it Really so Different Now?
Yes … and no.
Obviously, things have changed since the days of green bar reports. But, in the not-so-distant past, I had a conversation with a data leader (now a customer) who was working through a redefinition of their analytics culture.
When I first meet a new customer, I always ask why they would want to redefine their culture or process. If their goal is the same – achieving analytics at scale – why change process and culture now? In this conversation, the customer described a time when their company purchased the promise of Cognos to relieve the burden of writing code to create those lovely green bar reports.
After many years and with over 20,000 reports in their object store — many that hadn’t been used in years — they purchased the promise of Tableau. This company has some of the most beautiful dashboards that were created by data professionals and curated for the business. A step up from Cognos, no doubt. But was it true analytics at scale? If there was a change or an additional question, business users would have to wait weeks, at best, to get the data moved, transformed, augmented, and a report developed. More scale than with Cognos, but not true scale.
Even with this then-cutting-edge technology, this process broke down in all three analytics-at-scale pillars. They had a small, overworked data pipeline team that needed to extract, transform, and load data into the perfect table or view (which, of course, was never perfect.) The DBA technology itself didn’t have the horsepower to get data at the granularity that was needed. And the even smaller, overworked business power users couldn’t provide access to the wider business, buried under a never-ending queue of reports and dashboard modifications.
How Did They Solve the Problem?
This customer had a bold vision for a modern data architecture, and the courage to reimagine what it would take to provide analytics at scale by innovating around data, technology, and accessibility. The keys to this new architecture? ThoughtSpot and Alteryx.
With ThoughtSpot and Alteryx, the company empowered their business and data teams to connect, transform, model, and automate complex data analysis processes using the Alteryx Analytic Process Automation (APA) Platform™ and garner the ability to instantly generate granular insights using ThoughtSpot’s search and AI-driven analytics.
What Can You Do With ThoughtSpot and Alteryx?
ThoughtSpot customers can utilize Alteryx automation building blocks to access, prepare, augment, and blend diverse datasets – including existing third-party sources – then perform low code or no code data science, process automation, ML, and AI algorithms to enrich and predict “what may happen.” With Alteryx, this can be done in a matter of minutes without requiring specialized skills. The augmented data is then made accessible across the organization by ThoughtSpot using its search-based analytics, querying directly against Snowflake, Redshift, Google Big Query, and Synapse through ThoughtSpot Embrace.
Key Benefits
- Accelerate the data-science lifecycle. Automate large, complex data workflows — using 260+ analytics, low code, no code data science, AI/ML, and process automation building blocks — to provide comprehensive, self-service data and analytical models.
- Make your data both analytics and search ready. Easily connect, profile, prep, model, and blend data, while unifying analytics, data science, and process automation in one easy-to-use solution, incorporating all your enterprise data at its most granular level — wherever it resides — with 80+ data platform connectors. Scale as your data needs grow while maintaining governance and security. No aggregations or hierarchies required. Experience results in minutes to hours.
- Take action with faster insights. Upskill analysts and business users with a self-service, human-centered experience to find deeper, trusted insights and make smarter, faster decisions that deliver immediate business outcomes.
ThoughtSpot is available as a free trial without any commitment. Our team will be happy to show you how we can assist your analytics journey in any way.
You can also get a free trial of Alteryx Designer with complete access to all data prep, blending, and
analytics capabilities. Start now and see outcomes in minutes.