Alteryx says let's get visual

In the data world, we are used to visualizations. They're everywhere: in BI tools, in machine learning-oriented notebooks, in spreadsheets, and even in cloud management tools. But there are a few places where visualizations are still somewhat rare.

One such place is data preparation environments; another is machine learning (ML) model management tools. Apparently, the folks at Alteryx feel that needs remedying, as they introduce "Visualytics" in the Alteryx Platform.

What's it all about?
In an effort to add value to the core Designer product, and also to bring together the various platform components (Designer, Server, Connect and Promote), Alteryx is introducing Visualytics to provide, in the company's own words ,"real-time, interactive visualizations across the Alteryx platform"

Also read: Alteryx expands product set, makes data science acquisition
Also read: Alteryx Promote delivers AI/machine learning model deployment, management and integration

Visualytics has three pieces to it:

• Replacement of the static charting tool in Alteryx Designer with a new Interactive Charting tool, which provides charting with hover effects, filtering and drill down
• A new Insight Tool in Alteryx Designer, for combining multiple interactive charts into dashboards (shown above)
• Visualizations, inside Alteryx Promote's Analytics facility, that measure things like usage and performance of ML models. These vizzes (shown below) are based on the same technology used for Designer's Interactive Charts

Beyond Visualtyics
Visualytics is part of the 2018.3 release of the Alteryx Platform, which delivers other improvements. Among them is integration of Jupyter notebooks into Alteryx Designer. This allows Python developers to stay in the Alteryx environment. This also acts as a nice compliment to the many R-based tools in several tabs of Designer's ribbon.

For Alteryx customers who are also customers of Microsoft's Azure cloud, Alteryx Platform 2018.3 also adds in-database support for Apache Spark, compatible with Azure HDInsight and Azure Databricks, both of which offer Spark-based processing of data.

2018.3 also adds a new caching feature and capabilities in the Alteryx Server product to specify job priority levels and assign specific worker nodes to jobs. Finally, a new "smart asset recommendation"feature has been added to the Alteryx Connect data catalog product.

Going public with it
Data is hot -- and Alteryx's focus shows that managing and transforming data is hot too. Visuals will only make it hotter, and Alteryx ought to know: as of this writing, Alteryx's stock is near its all-time high, worth more than 3.5 times its closing price on March 24th of last year, the day of the company's IPO.