Is your data stack usable? Why self-service analytics drives high ROI

All right. Hi, everyone. Uh thank you so much for coming to this session. I know it's later in the day, so I really appreciate it. I promise it's going to be a fun one.

So uh quick show of hands. How many of you are familiar with All Tricks? Awesome. Ok. So just a few of you. So some of you are hearing about this for the first time. That's awesome.

Well, my name is Alex Gas. I am a Technical Product Marketing Manager for Architecture at Altri. So because I specialize in architecture, that means I focus a lot on the data stack and how you combine All T with other technologies like AWS. And when I'm not thinking about the modern data stack, I'm uh watching Formula One races. I am actually a rabid Formula One fan and uh it helps that uh the McLaren Formula One team is an All Turks customer and partner.

So because of that and the timing with the Las Vegas Grand Prix just having happened here, I thought it'd be a fun analogy to use for uh today's session. So, but that will get rocking and rolling.

So today I'm gonna talk about some challenges you might be having with your data stack today, I'll talk about a little bit more about All Turks and how we help you get more value out of your data stack. And then I'll show you a fun use case with a couple of different architecture scenarios uh for what that looks like.

So, uh if you watch any racing at all, you'll sometimes hear the driver complain that the car's undrivable. They'll say the steering wheel is not working right. The brakes aren't breaking something's going wrong. And I hear the same thing about a lot of data stacks, it's undrivable, it's unusable. And we see this a lot uh reflected in how your cloud is utilized. Many companies fall below 30% in cloud resource utilization. Only half of software licenses are used. Only 32% of companies report getting accessible value from data. Something's going wrong. The sax undrivable.

You might feel like you're sitting in the pit lane waving goodbye at the other cars zooming by because their drivers are able to get a lot out of their engines. Your drivers might not be able to do enough with yours. That's because the modern data stack wasn't designed for business users, right? Obviously, uh a lot of the modern technologies we use like the data warehouse, the data lake, uh they're code based. So when we abandon the spreadsheet in favor of these other technologies, we abandon the business user why do we care?

Well, the value of data comes from your business decisions, that's ultimately what it's for. And so if you're not empowering your business decision makers, that's a lot of value you're leaving on the table, you have only a few specific technical roles that are able to realistically get to the data. When instead you should be able to expand that across the organization, right? E everybody across different departments should be able to get value out of your data. And self service analytics is what will get them there now, easier said than done, right? uh but I have a solution for you, an accessible interface, a visual no code, drag and drop interface that allows the business users to interact with the data spoil alert and talking about All Tricks here, right?

But not just any accessible u i because that doesn't matter if it doesn't work with your AWS investment, right? uh you want something that can maximize performance wherever your data lives. So here comes another f one analogy, right? So in formula one, both the drivers and the engine matter. So you hear drivers talk about extracting performance from the car. That's because the engine isn't necessarily your differentiator. They all have engines, but the driver is what's different.

So the good news is you have your talented drivers, that's your business experts, right? Your marketing analyst, financial analyst, and you've got the engine as you modernize, maybe that's AWS. Uh what you need is the steering wheel to connect your business users with your engine. That's the accessible interface that gets people using AWS. You won't hear people saying that it's undrivable.

So think about your current data process. Can people get to the data that they need realistically? Do they have to go back and forth with the experts to get questions answered? Um so inaccessible u i also gets the job done sooner than later. Uh if you invest in something like AWS, maybe you have a lot of committed spend, you've spent a lot of budget there. You want to make sure it's delivering on the hype, right?

Uh the McLaren team actually has a rookie driver this year, Oscar Piaster, he crushed it in his first season. Lived up to the high right away. That's what you want for your technology investments, right? You want it to be living up to the hype. So you do that with something that's easy to get to speed on. Altri is recently recognized for delivering faster ROI, faster implementation, best usability. These are the things you should be looking for when you're building a data stock that's drivable sooner than later.

So now I'll tell you a little bit more about how that works. So think of All Turks as the interface for your stack that easy to use steering wheel in this case, AWS. So we cover all stages of the analytics journey, not just the prep at the beginning or the dashboard at the end, all the good stuff, the high-value stuff that happens in the middle, right, data science, machine learning, geospatial analytics and uh on the Alter platform, this is all powered by Aden our AI powered features and we connect seamlessly with your AWS services.

So your business users without needing to use code or any extra technical skills can easily connect to your AWS data and leverage your AWS engine. Uh so we offer things like push down processing with Amazon Redshift. So you're able to perform transformations directly on the data using our no-code tools. So you could potentially minimize data movement, speed up, run times, things like that.

So what is that easy to use interface look like? What's your steering wheel? So this is Trix Designer uh for those of you who said you were familiar with All Tricks in the beginning, this is probably what you're most familiar with. This is our most mature offering uh our flagship product and it's got that easy to use drag and drop no-code interface that we're known for.

But we're not just easy to use. We're robust, we're powerful, we can handle your most challenging data tasks. We could process billions of records. Uh we have 80/80 connectors and an open API if you need to connect to more data sources as needed and we're cloud connected. So you can connect to AWS. Uh you could deploy a designer on your desktop, but also in a virtual windows machine using an a EC2 instance. So you've got options.

Now, I talked about scaling more users across the company across different departments. Uh let's say you want to multiply the smartest person on your team. Uh you could do that with All Trick servers. So if you build a workflow in designer, uh you can easily share, collaborate um schedule workflows to run. So this is what you'll use for orchestration. Um this is something that has robust security and governance features and it can be be deployed on AWS.

But that's not your only option. We have our SaaS native applications as part of the Analytics Cloud platform interface. So we have accessible via interface in your browser. We have Designer Cloud, which we'll use to prepare and automate data pipelines. You can build machine learning models without needing to code. Uh Auto Insights is really cool. It uses AI to read your data set and identify key patterns and trends. So it goes beyond your typical dashboard, lets you explore and investigate the data location intelligence for geospatial insights. Uh and we also have orchestration and scheduling features as well.

Um now you can use an AWS private data plane. So even as you're interacting with the data via RaaS platform, you could still keep your storage and processing in AWS. Now what if you want to use a combination of approaches, right? A lot of you are probably in a hybrid situation, maybe you have existing on prem processes that you want to be able to scale into the cloud. Um we get that, that's why we built Cloud Execution for Desktop.

So what that allows you to do is build a workflow in Designer on your desktop. You can actually save that workflow to the cloud and schedule that to run in the cloud and that runs in your AWS data plane. So it's another way, um you can allow more drivers to get on board in your AWS ecosystem just from a different steering wheel. And that's why we say we help you get value at any stage of modernization.

Uh just like cars themselves are changing from gas to hybrid to electric. Your underlying engine is going to evolve, right? Tomorrow's, today's warehouse could be tomorrow's lake house and so on. There's always gonna be the next thing. So how do you make sure that your business users are still getting the most out of your engine even as everything is changing around you?

Well, the answer to that's keeping a consistent UI, right, your drivers are going to be the same, even even as your data stock evolves. So you wanna make sure that you have that consistent experience at each step, right? Just as your car changes from gas to hybrid, the steering wheel stays the same and that's what you should be doing for your analytic solution. Even as you're worrying about uh investing in the future, you could still be delivering value in the present with your business users.

So uh we help a lot of customers out with this kind of journey. Nielsen is my favorite one to point to. They are the definition of a data driven company. You might have even used their data before they are the uh TV ratings and audience insights leader. They use both All Turks and AWS.

So they had a legacy analytics process that they needed to overhaul. They'd invested in an AWS for the cloud infrastructure. Now, they wanted to make sure they could scale analytics across the company while also scaling their use of AWS. So they're able to iterate across thousands of people in the company using All Tricks, Designer and Server and that's thousands of people who wouldn't have otherwise been able to take advantage of that AWS investment.

Ok. So we're getting to the fun part. We have a very fun use case example. It is of course, Formula One theme shocker. And let's say I'm in charge of the newest Formula One circuit hint hint. It's here, Las Vegas and I wanna play in hospitality packages for my first race weekend.

Uh each of my departments might have different preferences for how they wanna work with data and I recently adopted AWS. So I wanna make sure I'm taking advantage of the services. So this is what that might look like in our Designer interface.

So this is access to your desktop, but again, can be deployed on a virtual windows machine. Uh here you have our hundreds of tool options for anything you might want to do with your data, everything from joining data sets together all the way through to more advanced things like text mining um creating a linear aggression model. And you could see if you've never seen Analytics Alters before in your life. You can see how easy it is to follow. We've got a very visual workflow.

So it's great for documentation for repeatability uh for business users who want to be able to see what's happening to the data at each step. Uh so as we go through, let's say we input our data set uh from S3. And what we want to do is map out the Formula One circuit and find out which hotels and restaurants are closest to the circuit.

Uh I could check out here my interactive results grid to uh preview the transformations that I'm doing on the data. So I don't have to run the whole workflow. I get that instant feedback to see what's happening at each step. And uh here I've done a Create Points tool. So it's one of our geospatial tools and I'm gonna render a map uh by creating a spatial object. So let's see what that looks like in a second. And there it is, uh you could see the circuit mapped out, uh all without code. So pretty cool. Right.

There's the Palazzo up there at the top. So that's where we are. Um but we're not done yet, right. We need to bring in more data, make that richer find out which hotels are closest. So I'll bring in another data set of all the hotel and restaurant locations in Las Vegas. And um once we do that, we'll narrow down which ones are nearest to the circuit.

So really helpful if for example, you're in retail and you want to map out store locations, um identify potential real estate investments or maybe you're in telecom and you want to map out cell towers and uh see what the coverage areas look like. Uh so we'll do that in just a few more tools and here it'll plot out the nearest hotels and restaurants to the circuit.

Um so there it's plotted those out. So really cool feature. Um it's just one example of the myriad use cases you could do with Designer like I said, it's robust and I'm able to build this from end to end without code while leveraging AWS.

Uh just a couple more tools it'll show us uh from top to bottom which ones are closest and it will zoom in here to the results grid to see ba um Panda Express is close to the top. My teammates are laughing at me because they know I'm obsessed with Panda Express and I know exactly where that one is. If you go outside onto the strip right by the Venetian, take a left past the Denny's, that's the Panda closest to the circuit. There's also one downstairs at the Canal Shops. I've got like a whole data set right up here of the Panda locations.

Ok. So that was a quick aside, but what you just saw was how someone with no coding skills or extra technical experience needed was able to get value from start to finish with something that's way cooler than prep and blend. They're able to dive into a business question, render a map um just with these tools. All right.

So just a couple of quick uh architecture examples of what that looks like. So like I said, you can deploy Designer desktop on an AC2 instance that helps leverage your compute. Um you can connect to your data repository really easily your S3 bucket uh potentially with Redshift. If you'd like, you can perform some of those uh transformations with our in database tools uh do some of that more upstream. And then if I want to share that workflow with others in my company, let's say I'm in charge of restaurants, I'm the Panda Express person, but someone else is in charge of hotels. I could share that workflow with them via Alter Server and that could be deployed on AWS.

Now, let's say I want to do that same exact use case build it in Designer desktop. But this time execute it in the cloud. I can use Cloud Execution for Desktop, uh connect my data build that same workflow. But this time save it to the cloud platform, have it run in my AWS account. So this is a way again to scale an existing on prem workflow that you might have built.

Um you can also recreate that just using our cloud solutions if you'd like. But um this is a hybrid example. So again, if you're familiar with desktop, maybe you wanna make sure that you're keeping your data workloads in AWS and transitioning over into the cloud.

All right. So it looks like we've got the checkered flag, we are reaching the finish line. So I'll do a quick recap.

Uh many of you in the audience are in charge of the data, you're in charge of making these decisions for the business, right? So it might make you feel pretty cool to know that you're not too different from a Formula One driver. Uh you're in the business of managing tradeoffs like managing tire wear while maintaining speed. At the same time, you're being asked to reduce cost, but make more money. You're being asked to invest in modern solutions like AI but make sure it's compatible with your existing legacy processes. Uh you're being asked to show value now, while you're making investments in the future and a self-service stack is what helps you manage each of those tradeoffs and continue driving value.

At each step, you show faster time to value with something that's easier to get up to speed on like Oscar Pia Street, just crushing it as a rookie driver. You're simplifying your stack. You have just one accessible UI that works in tandem with your AWS services, that steering wheel for your engine. And you could choose where it all happens. You have flexibility. You can combine your approaches to how you want to work with data.

And so with a self-service stack, maybe you can be the one who's zooming ahead to the finish line and winning the race while the other companies who aren't able to maximize their engines are the ones sitting in the pit lane.

So if that all sounded good to you and you do want to test out your racing skills come by our booth. It's right behind me in the data zone. We do have a McLaren simulator so you could try to beat my lap time, which you almost surely will because I drove the car the incorrect way for a while like embarrassingly long. Uh it's like Mario Kart, but harder. Here is the rest of the transcript formatted for better readability:

And uh I also have a QR code up here, which is our AWS Marketplace listing. So again, if you have committed spend, you wanna learn more about purchasing All Tricks. Um go ahead, I'll give you a few seconds to uh scan that QR code and we have a happy hour.

I know it's, uh, towards the end of the day for everybody. So, uh, come grab a beer with us later. We're having a awesome happy hour and we have tickets for that at our booth. So come by our booth to get that.

Um, and otherwise connect with me sometime this week, whether in person or on LinkedIn. I just really appreciate you all coming to this session and I hope you learned a little bit more about, um, making your data stock more drivable.

So see you on the race track.