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October 15, 2013

Alteryx and Revolution Partner to Foster R Adoption

Alex Woodie

Big data analytics vendors Alteryx and Revolution Analytics today announced a multi-year, multi-pronged partnership that will give Alteryx customers the capability to access Revolution’s R-based statistical functions–including in-database functions running in Teradata data stores–directly from the Alteryx user interface.

Alteryx has supported the open source R language in its Alteryx Strategic Analytics suite since early 2013. With the addition of Revolution Analytics’ R Enterprise software, Alteryx customers should benefit from the enhancements Revolution has done to R to parallelize it and make it run faster.

When the integration is complete (the beta is this quarter, with GA expected 1Q14), Alteryx customers will be able to harness R Enterprise capabilities directly from their Alteryx screens. The folks at Revolution Analytics say the ease of use of the Alteryx screens is what drove them to cement the partnership and do the integration work.

“Alteryx has done a fantastic job of making the statistical and predicative capabilities of open source R available to a much broader class of user,” says David Smith, a data scientist and marketing executive with Revolution Analytics. “You do it just through drag and drop. You don’t need any R programming at all.”

The integration points that Alteryx and Revolution are building will also extend to the in-database analytic processing that Revolution Analytics recently announced with Teradata’s data warehouse.

Alteryx already supported Teradata separately, says Alteryx COO George Mathew. “But now the beauty is it’s all nicely integrated together so we can take advantage of that compute context being in database,” he says. “Revolution can handle the compute context occurring in either of those locations as well as just in a stand-alone server, and Alteryx as a UI will naturally work regardless of where that compute context is running.”

The integration between the two products will be out of the box, and won’t require systems integrators to come in and perform any custom coding, Mathew says. There is also a bundling aspect to this partnership. Existing Alteryx customers with Personal or Professional editions will be eligible to get one Revolution Analytics Enterprise R entry-level workstation as part of the deal. Revolution, meanwhile, will be bundling Alteryx Personal Edition with the Revolution Analytics server.

The partnership provides a view of how vendors may align themselves in the great big data vendor shakeout to come. What that occurs–and it’s anybody’s guess when it will start–there will be a handful of “best of breed” vendors that survive in each category. In the statistical world, the SAS Institute and, to a less extent, IBM’s SPSS have the lion’s share of the market today, but are being threatened by upstarts like Revolution Analytics, which has worked to strengthen the open source R language, the simplify its adoption, and to otherwise make it “enterprise ready.”

There will also be a handful of surviving vendors on the visualization side of the analytics equation. Tableau Software probably has the most name recognition in this area, followed by vendors like QlikTech and TIBCO’s Spotfire. While obviously not apples-to-apples comparisons, these three products seem to occupy a similar place in the minds of many people watching the big analytics space.

But keep your eye on Alteryx. The Irvine, California-based company has attracted about 300 customers, including big names like Wal-Mart, Sprint, and McDonald’s, which is remarkable considering the company has been around for just three years.

Like Tableau and QlikTech, Alteryx has focused its efforts on building a “next-gen” analytic package that offers a consumer-grade interface and is easy to learn. To that end, the company has built pre-packaged analytic apps–such as a market share analysis app, an AB testing app, or an early R package–as well as overlays and themes (such the view of the US from space at night) that customers can browser and download from the Alteryx Analytics Gallery.

Alteryx has also attempted to differentiate itself in the market by building an ETL “pipelining engine” that can blend and enrich data–including structured and unstructured data–from a range of sources. It has also partnered with Tableau, which leans on Alteryx for this ETL pipelining engine, and which recently named Alteryx one its top software partner.

With Hadoop and Teradata and R and Alteryx, it seems like there’s a lot of moving parts here. The challenge is to keep the product packaging simplified, but for now the vendors are battling it out in a market that is just finding its legs.

“What you’re seeing is the emergence of a new analytic stack,” Mathew says. “Cloudera and Hadoop and the NoSQL vendors–they’re becoming the new data management layer for analytics.  And the new programming language…it’s all R based.” Vendors like Alteryx, meanwhile, provide data blending, predictive modeling, and application packaging, he says. “All of these things very seamlessly work together in this new stack.”

Related Items:

Preparing for Obamacare’s Big Data Analytics Opportunity 

Teradata Gets In Deep with R 

Putting the “R” Into Hadoop 

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