Alteryx Inc.’s latest partnership with Microsoft Corp. opens the door to throngs of potential customers for the Irvine-based analytics software maker in one of the fastest-growing segments in technology.
The deal makes Alteryx the first company to provide integrated analytics within Microsoft’s growing Power BI product designed to help users connect and understand disjointed sets of data in seconds.
More than 45,000 companies use the cloud-based intelligence and analytics services by Microsoft.
“We understand the footprint they have in a lot of enterprise organizations,” said Alteryx product marketing director Matt Madden.
Indeed, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft has more than 500,000 unique users in 185 countries of Power BI, which was overhauled in July with new visuals, touch-powered apps and enhanced customization.
The overhaul also melded data integration and predictive analytics—two areas of specialization for Alteryx.
“It’s really combining multiple data sources and doing some sort of analysis on it,” Madden said. “It can be simple or complex.”
Alteryx in the last year has doubled its customer base to some 1,000 companies, which pay a subscription fee for its analytics software to integrate data, monetize content, forecast sales, map out retail expansion plans, and compare sales and product placement, among other features.
Customers have included information service company Experian PLC, which has its North American headquarters in Costa Mesa; Lake Forest-based fast food company Del Taco Holdings Inc.; Walmart; Best Buy; and Verizon.
Amazon Tie
Individual users typically include marketers, analysts, salesmen and financial personnel.
Rising demand and key links with big, influential cloud service providers have pushed Alteryx’ annual revenue past $50 million.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth the last couple of years,” Madden said.
The company last month announced that its Alteryx Analytics 10.0 product syncs with Amazon Redshift to blend data for business users at the petabyte scale, roughly 1,000 terabytes or more. The offering from the Seattle online retailer is essentially a data warehouse that’s billed as allowing users to seamlessly store and analyze gobs of information through the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Irvine is a sales hub for the proprietary Amazon cloud storage service accessed by more than 1 million users, including the likes of big-data aggregators Netflix, Pinterest, Adobe Systems and Reddit.
Hot Sector
Alteryx is competing in one of the hottest tech sectors primed for big growth in the coming years.
U.K.-based Pringle & Co. forecasts the business intelligence and software services segment will hit $143 billion by next year, up from $76 billion in 2012.
San Francisco-based Zendesk Inc. paid $45 million last week for French software maker We Are Cloud SAS and its core product BIME Analytics, which helps users analyze and understand customer data from a diverse set of applications to simplify the complexity created by the proliferation of data sources.
The product used in 35 countries won’t have a material effect on Zendesk’s annual revenue, which hit $127 million last year.
Alteryx was founded in 1997 as SRC LLC and took the name of its core product in 2010, a common move in the software industry.
It has raised about $78 million to date, including a $60 million venture round last year led by New York-based Insight Venture Partners with backing from Toba Capital in Newport Beach and Palo Alto-based SAP Ventures, both of which were previous investors.
Alteryx employs about 100 in Irvine and 300 companywide in offices in San Mateo, Dallas, Chicago, Colorado, Australia and the U.K.
