As part of the launch of Alteryx 7.1 release the company is putting the capability for spatial analytics in the hands of more users. How will it do this?

Paul Ross, vice president  for product and industry marketing say they want to bring more spatial statistics capabilities to more users and "humanize" the big data conundrum. "People are overwhelmed by big data," said Ross. So Alteryx is offering a way to take the data and use it in a way for predicative analysis and understanding customer behavior. The latest release integrates "R" the statistical package widely in use. Sixteen prepackaged R tools to support predictive analytics are now included such as linear and logistic regression, K-centroids clustering as well as other data preparation functions.

"[With] 'big data' the hype outstrips the value," says Ross. Ross sees that  users want to access data without being a data scientist. Alteryx 7.1 will be delivering two critical connectors: Hadoop, the platform for managing big data and, mongoDB, the NoSQL database.

The reason for integrating these capabilities to manage big data volumes is to analyze customer use of social media and frequent buyer programs that help to determine buying patterns and behavior. Alteryx wants to allow users of their solutions to apply predictive modeling appropriately.  Users of R can build scripts and drag and drop them within the Alteryx workflow modeler and then build in statistical modeling capabilities. Ross says that lots of people have integrated  R but Alteryx wants to build capabilities to make the results available to managers. Ross believes that users don't want to wait for the statistics person to create the model.

In addition, Alteryx 7.1 includes pre-packaged consumer data from Dun & Bradstreet, TomTom and Experian. Everyone with an Alteryx license will receive these data sets.

Note: Join Alteryx for a webinar on Spatial Analytics Vaults VF Corporation to Retail Leadership on July 19