Alteryx Acquires Trifacta

Alteryx announced that it is acquiring Trifacta, a provider of data preparation software.  The acquisition supplements the Alteryx product family, particularly for cloud/SaaS data preparation tools.

Alteryx Product Evolution

Over the years, Alteryx had expanded its product family from the desktop data preparation roots into analytics, data science, and analytics process automation via internal development and acquisitions.  Even with this product line expansion, the majority of Alteryx use cases were still for data preparation and automation of the data preparation processes.

One area where Alteryx had struggled mightily was in transitioning its’ products to SaaS and the cloud.  Even though Alteryx had announced cloud-based products a couple of years ago, the company’s Designer Cloud is still only in limited availability, and the cloud offering on the AWS Marketplace is awkward to license and use.

Why Trifacta?

Trifacta’s Data Wrangler desktop product used a freemium pricing model and easy accessibility to gain a foothold among users.  The low-/no-code user interface makes it easy for analysts to use the product to prepare and transform their data.

Trifacta and Alteryx are both late in moving to the cloud and SaaS.  Trifacta used its’ relationship with Google to engineer a SaaS solution for Google Cloud.  Trifacta finally expanded completely to the cloud a year ago when it announced its Data Engineering Cloud SaaS solution.

Alteryx + Trifacta Overlap

The Alteryx and Trifacta products overlap in the area of data preparation and transformation.  Alteryx is stronger in the process automation side of data preparation, while Trifacta provides an easier to use, low-/no-code user experience.  Alteryx will likely try to blend the strengths of each product into a common offering but continue with its’ high, premium pricing model.

Trifacta’s Biggest Strength

Where Trifacta helps Alteryx the most is in the move to the cloud and SaaS.  Trifacta had been able to navigate this transition, although, as previously mentioned, Trifacta was also late to this party.  Alteryx has been unsuccessful in delivering its’ cloud and SaaS solutions.

Alteryx is maintaining a pool of $75 million in stock incentives for the Trifacta employees.  The reason for this goes beyond talent retention.  Alteryx sees the Trifacta Data Engineering Cloud as an essential piece to their solution set, and re-engineering the Alteryx products onto the Trifacta Cloud is a highly critical project.  Even with the engineering talent from Trifacta, transitioning the Alteryx products to the cloud will still be complex and potentially fraught with many problems.

A Data Transformation Solution:

The market for platforms in a modern data stack (data warehouses, data integration and pipelines, data modeling and transformation, etc.) has almost entirely moved to SaaS solutions.  Customers no longer want on-premise desktop solutions which can create data siloes and governance problems.  For data modeling and transformation, companies prefer a scalable, SaaS platform that integrates with the other SaaS components of the data stack, offers a multi-faceted user interface the embodies the various skills in the organization, and facilitates sharing and collaboration across projects.

Datameer

Datameer’s SaaS data transformation platform enables easy transformation of all your data to make it ready for analytics, ML, and reporting.  It provides a powerful no-code suite of out-of-the-box transformation functions for all citizen data users in addition to a robust editor to support use cases requiring SQL coding, complementing the Snowflake native capabilities.

In comparison to Alteryx and Trifacta, Datameer offers a much easier user experience for users with any level of programming experience via its’ unique combination of SQL, Low-, and No-code interfaces, supports much richer and easier catalog-like data documentation, and facilitates data collaboration among the users.  To learn more about how the products compare, read of guide, Top SaaS Alteryx Alternative.