Alteryx Combines Big Data Cloud Analytics with Social

Strategic analytics software provider Alteryx is launching a new version of its analytics platform, along with a new apps store, to combine sophisticated analytics with the social enterprise to make it easier to analyze and get insight out of Big Data in the cloud.

Alteryx Strategic Analytics 8.0 was developed to give more power and insight for business and data analysts. Alteryx is calling this “humanizing” Big Data, enabling analysts to drive informed strategic decision-making. Big Data, in or out of the cloud, is becoming an increasingly complex problem that all organizations have to tackle, and Alteryx is one of many vendors trying to make the management and — more importantly — the analysis of that data easier.

One of the key new elements of the 8.0 release is the Alteryx Analytics Gallery, a cloud-based apps store that Rick Schultz, senior vice president of Marketing, said will make user interaction with apps much faster.

“It really will make it much easier and faster and more efficient to both deploy applications if you’re a data analyst or a business analyst bringing together lots of data from lots of different sources,” Schultz told Talkin’ Cloud.

According to the company, the Analytics Gallery apps store will help drive the consumerization of Big Data, giving users the ability to access, share and curate collections of applications. Part of the release are five new drag-and-drop predictive analytics tools. It’s also a way to quickly design and publish analytics applications, Schultz said. The entire Analytics Gallery runs on Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) and supports Amazon S3 storage.

Additionally, a new Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) connector enables customers to use get deeper analytics and customer insights. Schultz noted the new connector gives customers access to a broader collection of data, including all customer data included in Salesforce.com, spreadsheets, databases, packaged content and social media sources.

“Traditional analytics platform vendors think that cloud analytics means hosting their difficult-to-use and costly solutions in a public cloud, putting huge constraints on the potential for big data and analytics to unleash creativity,” said George Mathew, president and COO of Alteryx, in a prepared statement. Alteryx hopes to change that and provide customers with apps that are as engaging as the consumer apps they use at home.