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March 29, 2017

Alteryx Goes Public as Data Prep Market Heats Up

Alteryx Inc., the self-service data analytics software specialist, has joined a growing list of business software vendors launching initial stock offerings as the big data market continues to mature.

Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE: AYX), Irvine, Calif., announced last week it would begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange at a share price of $14. Trading opened last Friday (April 24). The company closed its first day of trading up more than 10 percent, but its share price leveled off to just over $15 by midweek.

With origins dating back to the late 1990s, Alteryx had previously raised more than $160 million in three funding rounds before launching its IPO. Last week’s stock offering brought in about $126 million.

The company’s software is used to prepare and analyze data, and includes data “blending” tools designed to draw insights from large data sets in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) databases.

The timing of the Alteryx IPO coincides with the steady expansion of the self-service analytics market pegged at about $20 billion. Alteryx CEO Dean Stoecker has said the next two years are crucial for the company as larger players such as IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft target the growing market.

“Chief executives will finally begin to trust data, not just their gut,” Stoecker asserted recently, citing industry research revealing that long-standing CEO distrust of analytics tools is declining.

“Data has traditionally been seen as a black box, but many organizations now have a ‘curator’ of data—in some cases chief data officers or chief analytics officers—helping create a data-driven culture across the enterprise,” Stoecker added. “Better workflow visualization has increased understanding of data at the highest level and more executives will continue to embrace it.”

The Alteryx stock offering came one week after API specialist MuleSoft launched the year’s first enterprise technology stock offering that raised about $220 million in cash. San Francisco-based MuleSoft priced its stock at $17 per share.

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Alteryx Adds In-Database Blending

What 2017 Will Bring: 10 More Big Data Predictions

 

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