As self-service business intelligence programs mature across organizations, the challenge of data wrangling quickly becomes more apparent. Several tools on the market strive to make data preparation a self-serviceable task that relatively non-technical business users can do for themselves. With their easy, graphical, drag-and-drop interfaces, tools like Alteryx, Talend, or Matillian let business users build complex data flows for analytics. But what does the future hold for these stand-alone data preparation tools? ETR recently published an industry analysis report that explores this question.
Recent Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS) data shows spending intentions remain strong and growing for Alteryx, which recently acquired competitor Trifacta, while tools like Talend and Hitachi Pentaho are on the decline:
Despite the strength of Alteryx, however, the report discusses two specific threats that may be on the horizon for stand-alone data preparation tools:
1. Improved Data Preparation Capabilities in Business Intelligence Tools
The mainstream and pervasive self-service business intelligence vendors have invested in making data preparation capabilities more business user-friendly, adding similar drag-and-drop functionality and more sophisticated governance and manageability over data flows built within the tool ecosystems. The major players here include Microsoft Power BI, with its Dataflows and Common Data Model features; Salesforce’s Tableau, with its Tableau Prep Builder; and Qlik’s Dataflows concept, Qlik Catalog, and Qlik Replicate.
2. Augmented Analytics Leap-Frogging Business-Led Data Preparation
Augmented analytics, which describes business intelligence and data visualization driven by natural language processing (NLP), AI/ML, and automation, poses a different kind of threat to stand-alone data preparation tools entirely. With these capabilities, business users need only type or speak simple search queries and get visualizations and explanations of data delivered to them in real-time, with no need to do any serious data preparation.
The big business intelligence tools have all invested heavily in these capabilities: Microsoft Power BI’s Q&A feature, Tableau’s Ask Data and Explain Data features, and Qlik’s Insight Bot. There are also tools in the market that focus primarily on augmented analytics capabilities, most notably ThoughtSpot. While ThoughtSpot’s Net Sentiment has been declining, it continues to grow beyond its augmented analytics niche and capture new customers with better integrations, partnerships, and governance capabilities.
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