New Alteryx CEO sees platform as the canvas for AI prep

New Alteryx CEO Andy MacMillan wants the vendor to play a pivotal role in the data preparation phase of AI development.

MacMillan, who was officially introduced as Alteryx's CEO on Dec. 4, takes over leadership of the longtime data management vendor following a few years of tumult, including its December 2023 sale to private equity firms after 26 years as an independent vendor.

Alteryx was slow to react when data management and analytics shifted from an on-premises base to the cloud. While rival data preparation vendors such as Informatica saw the change and adapted, launching a fully cloud-native version of its platform in April 2021, Alteryx didn't unveil any cloud-native tools until May 2021 and didn't launch a fully cloud-native version of its platform until February 2023.

Meanwhile, to lead its transition to cloud, Alteryx overhauled its executive team, bringing in CEO Mark Anderson in October 2020, Suresh Vittal as chief product officer in 2021 -- he has since departed -- and Jay Henderson as senior vice president of product management in 2022, among others.

Beyond the executive overhaul and eventual development of cloud-native tools, Alteryx aggressively acquired companies such as Trifacta and Hyper Anna to add new capabilities. Those capabilities, however, were difficult to integrate and made the vendor's platform more cumbersome than it already was to use.

Ultimately, revenue growth slowed, falling from year-over-year growth of 75% during the fourth quarter of 2021 to under 8% during the third quarter of 2023. Similarly, Alteryx's stock price plummeted from $178 per share in 2020 to under $30 per share in August 2023 before rebounding slightly to $48 per share when Alteryx was acquired.

With Alteryx now a private company, as CEO, MacMillan is aiming to restore the vendor's growth momentum, he said in a recent interview, noting that the vendor has addressed issues such as integrating acquired technologies and cloud migration.

In addition to taking the steps needed to again become an attractive option for new customers as well as retain existing ones, MacMillan discussed potentially taking Alteryx public again when the time is right, market trends that are guiding Alteryx's product development plans and how Alteryx is positioning itself to be a platform for preparing data for AI development.

Editor's note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

What drew you to Alteryx? You were previously the CEO of UserTesting and Act-On Software. What was it about Alteryx that made you want to become its new leader?

Andy MacMillan: One, I think it's a great product. It's a product I've been around and had teams using before. But also, the next big challenge as it relates to companies rolling out AI is going to be getting their data ready for AI, and Alteryx is in an interesting and pivotal position to be the platform that people use to get their data ready for AI.

As you take over as Alteryx's CEO, what are some of the goals you have for the company?

MacMillan: The big goal is to apply the company's core strengths to this new problem. That's both a big opportunity and a challenge. When companies have been successful applying what they've been successful at to a new area, there's a bit of change management [that must occur]. That's both internal and external. We have to educate the market that we're the product to solve the emerging problem, so the goal is to position ourselves to do that.

You take over Alteryx amid a lengthy period of tumult with lots of executive turnover and last year's sale to go private. What are your plans to steady the company?

MacMillan: A lot of the change has been to steady the company. One of the things I like about the company is that it's now on firm footing [after] being taken private. We can organize the financials in a way that makes more sense going forward. It's a lot easier to do transformational changes out of the eye of the public market, so the company will have an ability to make a shift as a private company perhaps more easily than as a public company.

One of the big issues that plagued Alteryx in the few years before it was sold was slow adoption to the cloud, which led to loss of growth momentum. What are the plans for making Alteryx's platform more cloud native so it can better compete with other data preparation vendors?

Andy MacMillan

MacMillan: Sometimes these big technology waves solve a problem that the customers have been waiting for, and sometimes they're not as initially relevant. I think a lot of our customers were working on their desktops, and we were solving a problem for them, but then data sets moved. They moved into cloud data warehouses and things like that. So a lot of customers have been coming to us in the last few years and saying, 'Help me adopt to this new model.' We've built a whole lot of technology in the last couple of years that we're just starting to get out into the market, and now we're seeing a big uptake around it. I think we're going to see a lot of customers starting with that cloud platform first as we attract new customers.

We've definitely made those investments, but I don't want to shy away from the success we've had helping people work with smaller data sets on their desktop. Both are important, but we've definitely made a lot of investments in the cloud. Even in my onboarding, the first product I used from Alteryx was our Cloud Designer environment and started working with large data sets in the cloud.

With revenue growth slowing during the year before Alteryx went private, as CEO, how do you plan to attract new customers and restore growth momentum?

MacMillan: I don't know that I would attribute that slowing growth when the company was public as much to a technology or cloud issue as that everybody saw technology spend cut back. I don't think Alteryx was unique in that universe. I think what a lot of companies have done and what we've done is regroup, get focused on some new pipelines -- new areas where we can grow -- and start going out and finding new customers and solving new problems. That's what we've been doing, and that's what I'm going to be focused on.

One criticism I've heard about Alteryx is that it made a series of acquisitions but hasn't done a great job integrating their technology, which makes using Alteryx more difficult than some other platforms. Do you have plans to address ease of use and better integrate capabilities acquired in recent years?

MacMillan: We made some ambitious acquisitions that maybe took longer to integrate than we would have liked. But a lot of that is behind us now. When I look at the product portfolio now, a lot of those things have been built into the core product and work much more seamlessly than they did initially. That's maybe not an unusual criticism of tech acquisitions. Everybody sees the promise and then it takes a little bit longer than people would like to bring all the things together.

What I do think the company does a good job of is listening to our customer base. We have an amazing, huge community of certified users. We spend a lot of time listening to them about how they want things to fit together. We've done a good job over the last year to 18 months pulling the acquisitions together more closely than they had been prior.

While there might be some issues to address, as the new CEO, where do you see Alteryx in a few years once you've had time there to execute your vision for the company?

MacMillan: Historically, what we've done is give people a canvas or workspace that lets them work with data to solve problems. If you're a data worker of some kind or an analyst and someone asks you to figure something out, you would use our platform to pull together a bunch of data sets to figure it out. What's happened in the last couple of years is those data sets have gotten really big, and they've gotten dispersed in all these cloud environments. What we've built is a canvas for solving data problems in this cloud era. I think AI is going to be one of those problem sets as people get their data ready for AI.

What a lot of companies do is roll out a cloud data warehouse and then develop a dashboarding environment. That's great. But dashboards aren't necessarily where you go to work with data to solve problems. What I picture us doing is enabling everybody that has made investments in cloud data warehouses with a workspace where their business analysts can come to understand their business and figure things out. We've made investments in moving that canvas to the cloud to work with these big data warehouses. The future of the company is being that critical layer in the stack.

You mentioned AI. How do you envision Alteryx fitting in as enterprises invest more in developing AI models and applications?

MacMillan: There's an emerging role, which is an AI analyst -- a person who needs to figure out how a large language model or Salesforce agent understands not just the data in its universe but also other data in the company that's needed for AI agents to be successful. That's an important opportunity for us.

The next big challenge as it relates to companies rolling out AI is going to be getting their data ready for AI, and Alteryx is in an interesting and pivotal position to be the platform that people use to get their data ready for AI.

Do you envision Alteryx returning to the public markets with an IPO at some point? Or do you think it will more likely remain private going forward?

MacMillan: I definitely think the public markets could be an outcome for the company again. It's great to be public. You can use your stock to drive company growth. I took my last company public and thought that was a worthwhile experience. The most important thing, though, is building an enduring and important business that solves a big problem for people. Whether we're public or private is a financing strategy to make corporate goals happen. Being private is a great way to reorganize the company and restructure the company. Being public is a great way to continue to grow a company. It's great for doing acquisitions and other financing strategies. I think we can be a public company when it makes sense.

As we get the company restructured, one of the things we might do is take it public at some point.

Shifting away from finances, what is a major trend that is shaping Alteryx's future product development?

MacMillan: There are a couple. One is speed. People can develop great software much faster than in the past and with a lot more capacity. There are these great AI-assisted coding environments where developers are incredibly more productive. One of the things I like is that we have ambitious goals for what we want to do at Alteryx. Having that kind of productivity enhancement we're seeing in our product and engineering group is a great way to accelerate going out and solving problems for customers.

What's a second major trend influencing Alteryx?

MacMillan: Another is the market tailwind of AI. Every company is going to be rethinking every part of their business and how AI can impact it. We have a role to play in how those companies figure it out. Being able to move quickly means we can iterate with our customers and figure out how to help them make sure their AI is data informed. In addition, people are going to want to be able to trace the lineage of their data. If someone is using an agent to answer a question, they want to know that the data is right and where it came from, so data prep and data traceability are going to be important. Moving quickly to help customers solve that problem will be a goal.

Lastly, while I know you can't give reveal specifics about product development plans, what are some areas of focus for Alteryx as you take over as CEO?

MacMillan: One of the big ones is just meeting our customers wherever they happen to be at. For example, we have customers that want to use a public-cloud SaaS model and others that want to run us in their own data centers and their own public clouds. We want to meet them wherever they have a data workspace need. We've already built a bunch of technology to make that happen. Another is that we're investing in AI within our product. You can use our product to get your company ready for AI, but you can also use AI within our product to help you formulate reports, pull out summarizations and things like that, which are important. A lot of our users are data workers. Having an AI agent that can help them pick the right model or extract the right insights is an exciting development in our platform.

Then we're just continuing to make the product as cohesive as possible. That's always a goal so that whatever comes next in the data space, we can be counted on to let customers bring that into their workspace and work with that data.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial's data management and business analytics sites and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience.