Mark Anderson, CEO of Alteryx

Innovative Leadership Strategy and Change

Mark has served on the Alteryx board for the past two years, and prior to that grew Palo Alto Networks from pre-IPO days to becoming one of the pioneers in security companies. His go-to market background and truly fascinating insights made for a great conversation to discover how data science and AI are transforming the business landscape.

Alteryx initially started as a simple tool for analysts. Through innovative strategies and embracing the need for change during the pandemic and after, they’ve become a global enterprise platform playing a pivotal role in the data science industry. The global pandemic proved to be a catalyst, prompting Alteryx to attentively listen to customer feedback and use it as a driving force in decision-making. The company’s success in a crowded vendor landscape, standing out even on all three public cloud platforms – Microsoft, Google and AWS, is testament to their resilience and action. Quick thinking has propelled Mark’s company into an addressable market that’s estimated to be over $100 billion this decade.

“Data is everywhere. It’s in people’s hard drives, it’s on server hard drives, it’s in data lakes in the enterprise, running legacy technology in data lakes, it’s in cloud data warehouses now, it’s in public cloud and public SaaS environments. So you’ve got to be able to really be an orchestration layer for the enterprise, which is really what Alteryx Designer is. You’ve got to be able to push that logic and that innovation down into those environments to really help them do what we need to do with our software engine to help customers get insights.”

Death of Data Scientists

A recurring challenge many departments face is the automation of their processes, a problem amplified by a scarcity of data scientists and engineers. Alteryx’s solution to this was to develop user-friendly low-code/no-code software. This software empowered spreadsheet users, transforming them into data wizards capable of automating manual processes and democratizing data science. It was a game-changer for many organizations struggling with data management and automation.
“Everyone’s still using manual processes and or software in many parts of their business. And so today with our rebooted go to market motion, we actually start with the outcome, the business outcome or the use case that customers need and will pay for today. If you go to our website today and look at our use case navigator, there’s hundreds of use cases, like a couple of dozen in tax, for example, that are templatized and allow us to go into a customer and say, looks like you’re looking to automate tax, given the new dynamic of remote workforce.

All we need is a couple of analysts on your side, couple of days of training. And we try to land with a business outcome. Then we expand into adjacent parts of the business or additional use cases within that part of the business. The world needs data engineers, but they’re very expensive, and there just aren’t enough of them. And so we’re right there in the sweet spot of focusing on the people within the line of business that, just with a few days of training can automate much of their processes, with altered software. I think every company is looking to upskill their knowledge workers and take advantage of these capabilities to go faster, to do more. And, these days to do more with less.”

The growth strategy of Alteryx is based on adaptability and agility. The company has made strategic hires and smart acquisitions to bolster its position in the industry; also partnering with companies like Snowflake and Databricks, the two primary cloud data warehouse providers, as well as Google BigQuery. Per Mark “Google actually OEMs Alteryx for their data prep tool in BigQuery.” Their end-to-end data analytics platform facilitates users across an enterprise to drive crucial decisions resulting in positive business outcomes. Recent integrations with Databricks Lakehouse platform, build on their existing portfolio of innovations, which include Alteryx AiDIN, and Databricks’ large language models (LLM) like the recent Dolly, that make analytics, machine learning, and generative AI more accessible.

Don’t Forget Cyber Security When Fixing The Data Mess

Another major focus area is educating their users on cybersecurity. “Enterprises everywhere are looking for, frankly, educating their users because you’re only as strong as your weakest link. We’ve hired a great CISO that has really delivered a lot of education to our users to make sure that we’re following best practices and then we’re using capabilities -tools like my old company, Palo Alto Networks and many others to really provide the platforms that can help not only secure our access of our employees, but our customers access to our innovation in the cloud. And that’s a big part of Lucas Moody as our CISO, a big part of his job is working with product and engineering to build security into the products for the cloud from day one, not as an afterthought.”

Scaling With AI And Next-Gen Tech

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been instrumental in propelling Alteryx into a universal enterprise platform. “We’ve averaged about 30% year over year annual recurring revenue growth. And that’s why we’ve been retooling and rebooting the business.”

“AI is going to be massive. I mean, it really will help us accelerate the time to value and really help us help our customers build better workflows faster, which is going to be great for business. I think for us, it’s going to help us go. We’ve doubled our user count roughly in the last 2 and a half years. I hope we can continue to run at that clip or faster. And I think generative AI is going to help us do that. We’ve been using artificial intelligence in a lot of what we do already. So the step towards large language models is a step we’re already taking ourselves. And in fact, we announced three new products at our customer conference this past May in Las Vegas.”

As for Mark’s parting words of wisdom, “Every year, you’re a different company and customers expect more and new competencies from your people, and so you’ve got to be on top of that and I just hope I can continue to take this company to where I think we all believe it can go.” Alteryx has positioned itself as more than a software; it’s a bridge connecting data engineers and scientists with the rest of the world.