Humanizing Big Data with Alteryx

In my last post, I described Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ product for big data. In today's post, I will describe Teradata partner Alteryx which provides innovative technology that can help you to get the maximum business value from your analytics using the Teradata Unified Data Architecture.™

Companies can extract the highest value from big data by combining all relevant data sources in their analysis. Alteryx makes it easy to create workflows that combine and blend data from relevant sources, bringing new and ad hoc sources of data into the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ for rapid analysis. Analysts can collect data within this environment using connectors and SQL-H interfaces for optimal processing.

Create Business Analytics in an Easy-to-Use Workflow Environment

Using the design canvas and step-by-step, workflow-based environment of Alteryx, you can create analytics and analytic applications. With a single click, you can put those applications and answers to critical business questions in the hands of those who need them most. And when business conditions and underlying data change, Alteryx helps you iterate your analytic applications quickly and easily, without waiting for an IT organization or expensive statistical specialists.

Base Your Decisions on the Foresight of Accessible Predictive Analytics

Alteryx helps you make critical business decisions based on forward-looking, predictive analytics rather than past performance or simple guesswork. By embedding predictive analytics tools based on the R open source statistical language or any of the in-database analytic capabilities, Alteryx makes powerful statistical techniques accessible to everyone in your organization through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Understand Where and Why Things Happen: Location Matters

Whether you are building a hyper-local marketing and merchandizing strategy or trying to understand the value of social media investments, location matters. Traditionally, this type of insight has been in the hands of a few geo specialists focused on mapping and trade areas. With Alteryx, you can put location specific intelligence in the hands of every decision maker.

With the rise of location-enabled devices such as smart phones and tablets, consumer and business interactions increasingly include a location data-point. This makes spatial analysis more critical than ever before. Alteryx provides powerful geospatial and location intelligence tools as part of any analytic workflow. You can visualize where events are taking place and make location-specific decisions.

Alteryx can push custom spatial queries into the Teradata Database to leverage its processing power and eliminate data movement. You can enrich your spatial data within the Teradata system using any or all of these functions provided by Alteryx:

• geocoding of data;
• drive-time analytics;
• trade area creation;
• spatial and demographic analysis;
• spatial and predictive analysis;
• mapping.

Alteryx simplifies the previously complex tasks of predictive and spatial analytics, so every employee in your organization can make critical business decisions based on real, verifiable facts.

Deliver the Right Data for the Right Question To The Right Person

To answer today’s complex business questions, you need to access your sources of insight in a single environment.That is why Alteryx allows you to bring together data from virtually any data source, whether structured, unstructured or cloud data, into an analytic application. Using Alteryx, you can extend the reach of business insight by publishing applications that let your business users run in-database analytics and get fast answers to their pressing business questions.

Teradata and Alteryx: Powerful Insights for Business Users

To exploit the opportunities of all their data, organizations need flexible data architectures as well as sophisticated analytic tools. Analysts need to rapidly gather, make sense of and derive insights from all the relevant data to make faster, more accurate strategic decisions. But given the variety of potential data sources, it is difficult for any single tool to be most effective at capturing, storing and exploring data. Using the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ with Alteryx enables you to explore data from multiple sources, as well as the ability to deploy the insights derived from the data.

You can create sophisticated analytics, taking advantage of new, multi-structured data sources to deliver the most ROI. The combined solution:

• integrates and addresses both structured and emerging multi-structured data Leverages the Teradata Integrated Data Warehouse, Teradata Aster Discovery platform and Hadoop to optimal advantage;
• creates both in-database and cross-platform analytics quickly without requiring specialized SQL, MapReduce or R programming skills;
• lets you combine the capabilities of the Alteryx environment with routines developed in other analytical tools within a single analytical workflow;
• easily deploys analytics to the appropriate users beyond the analyst community.

The combined solution of Alteryx and the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ provides an IT-friendly environment that supports the need to analyze data found inside and outside the data warehouse. Analysts and business users can leverage powerful engines to create and execute integrated applications. This kind of analysis is only possible with an environment that can bring together routines created by separate tools and running on different platforms.

Enhancing the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ with the speed and agility of Alteryx creates a powerful environment for traditional and self-service analytics using integrated data and massively parallel processing platforms. It delivers:

• a complete solution for the full life-cycle of strategic and big data analytics, from transforming, enriching and loading data to designing analytic workflows and putting easy-to-use analytic applications in the hands of business users;
• improved ability to manage and extract value from structured and multi-structured data;
• ability for business analysts to create data labs and perform predictive and spatial analytics on the Teradata data warehouse and Teradata Aster discovery platforms;
• faster analytical processing within applications using in-database analytics in Teradata and SQL MapReduce functions in Teradata Aster.

The Alteryx solution helps customers with the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ achieve these benefits by providing the following:

• robust set of analytical functions;
• access to a rich catalog of horizontal and industry-specific analytic applications in the
• Alteryx Analytics Gallery;
• syndicated household, demographic, firmographic, map and Census data to enrich existing sources;
• native data integration and in-database analytical support for Teradata data warehouse and Teradata Aster capabilities;
• ability to leverage Teradata SQL-H™ for accessing Hadoop data from Aster or Teradata Database platforms.

Use Case: Predicting and Preventing Customer Leave

Problem

A global communication service provider is interested in preventing customers leaving by identifying at-risk customers and providing special offers that reduce the likelihood of leaving in a profitable way. To do this, they need predictive analytics.

Solution

Teradata and Alteryx deliver an end-to-end analytic workflow process from data consumption and analysis to application deployment. Alteryx integrates and loads call detail records from diverse sources along with customer data from the Teradata warehouse into the Aster database to create a complete, rich data set for iterative analysis. You can run iterative discovery analysis to determine the key indicators behind customer leaving and loyalty. These key indicators are captured as repeatable applications to enrich the data warehouse with leaving and loyalty scores. In addition, the discovery analysis is captured and deployed to the business users as a parameterized application for further iterative analysis.

Key Solution Components

• Aster Discovery platform for deep analytics and segmentation;
• Teradata data warehouse to operate and deploy insights and enriched data across the enterprise;
• Alteryx for the user workflow engine to orchestrate data blending and analytics.

Benefits

• Ability to identify key customers that are likely move candidates;
• determine problem spots on the network (cell sites, network elements) that are driving move;
• discover other key reasons for move (performance, competitive offers);
• discover which offers have prevented churn for similar customers in the past;
• identify which offers will work and evaluate a least-cost offer to prevent move;
• ability to make offers to keep customers from leaving;
• deeper understanding of customer behavior.

Teradata - Analytics for Big Data

Successful companies know that analytics is the key to winning customer loyalty, optimizing business processes and beating their competitors. 

By integrating data from multiple parts of the organization to enable cross-functional analysis and a 360-degree view of the customer, businesses can make the best possible decisions. With more data and more sophisticated analytics, you can realize even greater business value.

Today businesses can tap new sources of data for business analytics, including web, social, audio/video, text, sensor data and machine-generated data. But with these new opportunities come new challenges.

For example, structured data (from databases) fits easily into a relational database model with SQL-based analytics. Other semi-structured or unstructured data may require non-SQL analytics, which are difficult for business users and analysts who require SQL access and

iterative analytics.

Another challenge is identifying the nuggets of valuable data from among and between multiple data sources. Analysts need to run iterations of analysis quickly against differing data sets, using familiar tools and languages. Data discovery can be especially challenging if data is stored on multiple systems employing different technologies.

Finally, there is the challenge of simply handling all the data. New data sources often generate data at extremely high frequencies and volumes. Organizations need to capture, refine and store the data long enough to determine which data to keep, all at an affordable price.

To exploit the competitive opportunities buried in data from diverse sources, you need a strong analytic foundation capable of handling large volumes of data efficiently. Specifically, you need to address the following three capabilities:

Data Warehousing - integrated and shared data environments for managing the business and delivering strategic and operational analytics to the extended organization.

Data Discovery - discovery analytics to rapidly explore and unlock insights from big data using a variety of analytic techniques accessible to mainstream business analysts.

Data Staging - a platform for loading, storing and refining data in preparation for analytics.

Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ product includes a Teradata data warehouse platform and the Teradata Aster discovery platform for analytics, as well as open-source Apache Hadoop for data management and storage as needed.

Data Warehousing

The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse is the foundation of the integrated data warehouse solution. This appliance works well for smaller data warehouses or application-specific data marts.

Data Discovery

For data discovery, the Teradata platform uses patented SQL-MapReduce® on the Aster Big Analytics Appliance, providing pre-packaged analytics and applications for data-driven discovery. Mainstream business users can easily access this insight using familiar SQL-based interfaces and leading business intelligence (BI) tools. If you are performing discovery on structured data, a partitioned data lab in the data warehouse is the recommended solution.

Data Staging

Hadoop is an effective, low-cost technology for loading, storing and refining data within the unified architecture. However, Hadoop is not designed as an analytic platform.

The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance and the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance offer cost-effective storage and analytics for structured data. The Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ integrates these components into a cohesive, integrated data platform that delivers the following capabilities:

• unified management of both structured and unstructured data at optimal cost;
• powerful analytics spanning SQL and MapReduce analytics;
• seamless integration with the existing data warehouse environment and user skillset.

The Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ handles all types of data and diverse analytics for both business and technical users while providing an engineered, integrated and fully supported solution.