Analytics platform provider Alteryx recently announced its acquisition of Trifacta, an intelligent, visual data engineering cloud platform, for $400 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.

Trifacta is a cloud data management and machine learning platform provider. The platform supports collaboration and interactions of data teams to profile and prepare data pipelines for analytics and machine learning purposes. 

Alteryx is an analytics automation company described on G2 as “a fun, low-code / no-code, end-to-end data analytics platform that allows anyone, anywhere, to turn extraordinary amounts of data into quick insights that help them create breakthroughs every day.”

How will the acquisition benefit both firms?

The announcement comes when interest in cloud data management and cloud-native capabilities has grown. The need for an analytics platform to support cloud capabilities is no longer an option but a necessity. In the G2 Grid® report for Big Data Analytics for Winter 2022, we observed that according to G2 reviewers, only 17% were deploying Alteryx in the cloud. The acquisition will not only aid Alteryx’s journey into the cloud, but the firm will also be able to expand its horizons to include customers in large and very large enterprises.

Mark Anderson, CEO of Alteryx, said in the company’s announcement:

“Trifacta brings highly skilled cloud-first engineering, product and go-to-market teams with decades of combined experience building and bringing to market mission-critical, cloud native analytics solutions. With Trifacta, our combined cloud platform will serve the needs of entire enterprises from data analytics teams and IT/technology teams to line of business users."

Alteryx had also acquired Lore IO, a no-code AI-enabled data modeling platform provider, back in October 2021. This acquisition was aimed at helping customers manage huge datasets and rapidly deploy analytics. Prior to this, in the same month, Alteryx acquired Hyper Anna. Hyper Anna is a leading cloud platform focused on generating automated, AI-driven data insights.

These acquisitions reflect Alteryx’s commitment to building cloud capabilities for their platform to ensure smooth data management and data democratization.

Data quality is an integral part of data strategy

Alteryx’s Trifecta deal also aims to improve focus on data preparation, data cleaning, and data quality and becomes part of the larger trend in organizations seeking to build their company goals and strategies around data and analytics insights.

Below we have a snapshot of Trifacta’s reviews on G2.com.

Source: Reviews for Trifacta on G2

To ensure companies get the best insights from their data, it's important to ensure that data quality is a part of its data objectives. Data first needs to be prepared for consumption to achieve data quality goals. Data preparation forms an integral part of data quality initiatives and is defined as the process of discovering, blending, combining, cleansing, enriching, and transforming data so that large datasets can be easily integrated, consumed, and analyzed with business intelligence and analytics solutions. If companies want to drive data insights without addressing data quality issues, financial losses from poor quality data could run into billions of dollars.

Data analytics industry to see big changes—cloud is the way forward

One of the key outcomes of this acquisition aims at a flexible platform deployment. Alteryx will now leverage its platform using Trifacta’s cloud data management capabilities on a host of cloud providers: Google Cloud platform, AWS, and Azure. Business opportunities will be driven by the fact that public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises can now carry data analytics.

Edited by Shanti S Nair