Wow, it was a whirlwind event at the Alteryx Inspire 2018 Conference last week, and it truly lived up to its tagline, “Alter Everything”!
At 7:30 a.m. before the Opening Keynote, The Doors opened – and yes, those capital letters are there on purpose. The Doors, an exceptional cover band of the same name, started jamming at an early hour, launching us into a full-on rock concert and setting the tone of electric energy for the next few days!
The entire conference was a quickstep pace of focused training, entertaining and compelling keynotes, informative sessions, and enlightening discussions. Completing the many activities were the Alt Nation Sponsor Hall (where Resultant deployed an interactive Alexa experience within our booth), a hands-on interactive solution center, user group lounge and the opportunity to assist with Alteryx For Good.
A sold-out Women of Analytics luncheon featured five panelists that spoke about their and their family members’ journeys and experiences in the analytics realm. A very competitive Alteryx Grand Prix pitted Alteryx superstars against each other in a winner take all competition, with the winner being decided by just a few seconds. Each day culminated in a party atmosphere, like the “Codechella” celebration, abounding with amazing music, cold refreshments, and food trucks supplying delicious bites.
Our Resultant team was privileged to be among the many conference attendees that not only saw the new enhancements coming for version 2018.2 in the keynote, but received a glimpse of things to come as Alteryx accelerates the concept of “Alter Everything”.
What’s New in Alteryx Analytics 2018.2
There are many exciting new features, additions to existing functionality, and improvements to the overall user interface:
Alteryx Connect
Alteryx Connect is extending its capabilities, including new metadata loaders for:
Connect will also feature a REST API for data consumption, as well as fast metadata load from the Alteryx Gallery. IT and data governance staff will appreciate the enhanced SAML Authorization interface for Alteryx Connect.
In addition, there will be SAML Single Sign-On (SSO) Authority Support for Alteryx Server Gallery.
Alteryx Designer
Alteryx Designer will feature lots of impressive changes, such as new connectors for:
As well as enhancements to existing connectors:
- Snowflake Bulk Loader
- InDB generic ODBC
- Tableau Spatial
- Gzip read
This new version also introduces Analytic Templates containing pre-built workflows and sample data, which will allow new users to ramp up quickly and join the analytic world. Templates will include functional analytic tasks (such as data blending), department-specific topics, and industry-related workflows.
Another thrilling addition is a new Python SDK, which will enable the utilization of third-party Python packages to perform text analysis, Machine Learning, and other tasks.
Powerful Alteryx Promote, which deploys predictive models into production, will provide integration with Community search, along with improvements to R Deployment and Metadata.
Future Enhancements
Some very profound enhancements are coming our way with the new Alteryx Analytics 2018.2. Looking beyond even this upgraded version, our Teknion team was also privileged to see the cool new features being tested in beta versions.
These include:
- The remarkable features of Visualytics, which will provide Interactive Charting capabilities within Alteryx.
- Tool Caching will allow users to cache results, speeding up workflow development; simply swipe and highlight the tools you want to cache, click and cache those tools!
The audience definitely reacted positively to these future enhancements.
Ashley Kramer, VP of Product Management, and her team at Alteryx have been working tirelessly to bring these concepts to reality. There are so many innovations and improvements, and I can’t wait to explore this new version and all its capabilities and benefits. As I say every year, Alteryx Inspire truly does inspire you; with creativity, knowledge and the drive to “Alteryx” your analytics!
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