With the acquisition of Trifacta, Alteryx aims to accelerate its cloud services and leverage a close partnership with Google as a provider of Google DataPrep.
Alteryx is known for its so-called ETL tools, short for Extract, Transform and Load. Those are what organizations use to prepare their data for analysis. Alteryx then provides connectivity to BI tools like Tableau for specialized research.
The $400 million acquisition of Trifacta seems odd at first because the company ostensibly does the same thing as Alteryx. It likewise kneads data for processing, but uses machine learning (ML) within a cloud-native environment to do so. Within their tool, Trifacta can reduce data preparation by up to 90 percent in total work time.
Alteryx wants to take that experience to build modern data architectures into cloud data warehouses and various SaaS apps. According to Alteryx CEO Mark Anderson, it wants to combine cloud-native features from Trifacta with Alteryx’s own low-code analytics platform. The acquisition also creates an important bridge between data engineers and Alteryx on the one hand, and analytics and data science professionals at Trifacta on the other.
An added bonus is Trifacta’s close relationship with Google as a provider of Google DataPrep. Alteryx may want to further leverage that link to work more closely within GCP.