Top Gun 51 Profile: Josh Lewis on Alteryx's Analytic Process Automation Opportunity

Alteryx, a supplier of analytic process automation (APA) software, is riding the digital business transformation wave. Founded in 1997, Alteryx is now going through its own transformation. In October, the company’s founding CEO, Dean Stoecker, passed the reins to Mark Anderson, who previously was Palo Alto Networks’ president.

Stoecker, who is now executive chairman, stepped aside to enable a seasoned executive to accelerate growth. Alteryx, which went public in 2017, offers tools that sit between data management platforms and analytics interfaces such as Tableau. Alteryx’s platform unifies analytics, data science and business process automation.

Channel chief Josh Lewis said Anderson’s arrival promises to boost Alteryx’s effort to expand indirect sales through partners. Lewis, who joined the company nearly three years ago, is among those channel executives chosen by a panel of distributors, master agents and industry analysts for this year’s Top Gun 51 list. Channel Futures spoke with Lewis about how his team has helped partners address the growing demand for modern analytics tools. The following are some highlights, edited for clarity.

Channel Futures: What are some of the ways you have helped Alteryx expand its go-to-market and partnering efforts?

Josh Lewis: We are in hyper growth mode. Our growth trajectory has just been just tremendous. It has been a rocket ship. Our partners play a critical role in that.

CF: When you arrived nearly three years ago, how partner-focused was the company?

Alteryx’s Josh Lewis

JL: Prior to coming on board, there was a lot of great partner engagement. The form and fit and substance of how we worked with partners needed some work. During a talk I gave at our partner summit in October, I referenced one of my favorite coaches, Jim Harbaugh. He was a 49ers coach and now is the coach at Michigan. My family’s all from Michigan. So I have very much a football mindset. Real growth happens over time. It is incremental, and that can lead to really big change. It has translated into things like modernizing our partner program, making sure that it’s on brand. We have focused on making sure we have best-in-class infrastructure and policies. And making sure that they really feel part of our success as a company.

CF: How can you tell?

JL: Most of our partners are users of our technology; that’s often where we start. This is not like selling a commodity product. We’re really selling a high IP kind of solution and it takes a certain profile. We know it when we see it. A lot of our partners really do feel very connected to us. In our recent survey, partners told us that we’ve gotten better over the last couple years.

CF: What have you done to make it best-in-class?

JL: Certainly, building out a great team in the field. When I came on board, there were a couple of us. Now the team is more than 30 people. We’ve gone through …

… a fairly sizable geographic build out of the team.

CF: Can you share more about the expansion of the channel sales team?

JL: When you are invested in their success, one of the best ways you can do that is by providing greater support, whether that’s technical support, or marketing support, or field support. Also, we have invested heavily in systems and making sure that we have great data quality. We deployed a new partner portal based on Webinfinity. One of the reasons we chose Webinfinity was we felt it was a really good communication platform for us.

CF: What is the makeup of your partner ecosystem?

JL: We work with [direct market resellers] on a straight fulfillment basis. We certainly work with a lot of value-added resellers, and we do a lot with the influencer model, which is a collaboration model where we’ll take down the licenses and we’ll pay them like an agent fee. And depending on the country, the model varies. But certainly, our expectations are to continually improve our partner attached as a core metric that we track closely.

CF: So how would you describe the key focus of Alteryx software?

JL: Analytic process automation is a category that we have established for the industry, around how people can use analytic tools.

[The company describes APA as technology that automates tedious and complex processes, turn data into results and let anyone in an organization share it].

But because it was a new category, we absolutely needed the ecosystem to be there with us. A lot of work went in ahead of time, briefing partners, getting them excited, and making sure that they could represent what we’re doing. And then we did a lot with content syndication to getting them to sort of reinforce our messages through blogs, and through syndicating our content and other things. We’ve tried to leverage the ecosystem as the magnifying force that’s out there.

CF: Obviously, one key obstacle this year has been the pandemic. What impact has that had?

JL: For us as a hyper growth company, COVID-19 has been a challenge, because we’ve been growing at a near vertical curve. Everyone was affected. We made every effort to dial up communication with partners, to let them know we’re in this together. We adjusted some of the programmatic things that we do with them. Furthermore, we waived partner fees for the year. These are long-term relationships, and we can’t win in the market without them. We needed to make sure that they knew that we have their back. We haven’t really seen much drop off.

CF: When Alteryx lowered the near-term forecast last month, it raised some eyebrows. What is your message to the partner community about that?

JL: When I talk to partners, we remind them that there’s an amazing opportunity around Alteryx. We’re going to continue to push more and more business to them in every way we reasonably can. We’re going to continue to make it easy to do business with us, in the most partner-friendly way that we can. But when you’re a hyper-growth company growing at the rates that were growing, revising your forecast, frankly, is more putting it in the range of what normal growth companies would do. I think partners recognize that. The way that customers often buy our technology is …

… very much in what we would call land and expand. And so getting in the door is often the hardest thing, and then the technology is very sticky.

CF: What does the appointment of Mark Anderson as CEO portend?

JL: Mark is definitely a friend of the channel. Palo Alto Networks has a very strong business, obviously, with a very strong ecosystem. He is very supportive of what we’re doing. We have huge aspirations of being a very large company. Mark brings a great pedigree and set of experiences from Palo Alto Networks and F5 and other places.

CF: When you mentioned new partners coming into the ecosystem, what would you say is the key appeal of Alteryx?

JL: Our ecosystem has a lot in common with Snowflake‘s ecosystem, and Tableau’s ecosystem. There’s this modern BI stack where people are using Snowflake as a data repository — it has a great set of tools and resources. Tableau is a phenomenal tool for visualization and giving real insight to all kinds of things. Were really the analytic engine that sits in between those. Customers are typically buying all or part of that stack. A lot of our partners are Tableau partners and/or Snowflake partners, and there’s this integrated thing that they are selling. Many new partners that come on board tend to be specialized. They’re either deep into data science, or maybe they’re handy consulting in a specific industry — health care, health sciences or financial services.

CF: What will be your key priority for 2021?

JL: I’m focused on making sure that we can be as relevant as we can be to more customers through our partnerships. We’re going to continue to expand into more industries. We announced a big partnership with PwC and that is going well. PwC is also a big user of Alteryx, and that’s made the relationship really interesting and exciting. A lot of customers obviously rely on those large consultancies to help them run their business. We’re organizing ourselves to be able to execute with our current ecosystem, and also looking at different kinds of relationships to help us scale up and out.