Of course there are. There are few things in a category of their own in this world.
Do I think Alteryx is the best in the APA category today? Yes I do. In fact, I just might say they are in a class of their own!
But this is a category, and that almost always indicates that there are others in it. So let’s explore that briefly.
To begin, we need to agree on the “must-haves” and “deal-breakers” to be considered an APA platform (and this must have sign-off from business and IT). For me, this is:
Must-haves
- Security
- Code-free (easy to learn eg: drag-and-drop)
- Community (community.alteryx.com)
- Input/Output agnostic
- Scheduling/Automation
- Unified experience
- Scalability
- BI visuals
- Data Science
- Code-friendly (SDKs)
Deal-breakers
Nice-to-haves
- Advanced Visualization
- RPA
- Spatial Processing
- Workflow Templates
- App Marketplace
So, what other “players” are out there in this APA category?
Well, because there’s no rank yet out there from Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. to tell us what’s good, here is who I expect to remain APA players in the next 2 years.
In alphabetical order:
- Alteryx
- AWS
- Dataiku
- Google
- Microsoft
- Salesforce
Did I miss anyone? Please do comment on the original LinkedIn post and I will be happy to add if it makes sense.
And yes, of course we can and should compare head-to-head each of the “must-haves” listed above, and take another look at how the “nice-to-haves” evolve into “must-haves” year-over-year. But, these galaxies of the APA universe are ever-expanding, so I tend to focus my attention on the platform that offers the full end-to-end offering for analytics today, the best APA platform out there: Alteryx.