AYX - Alteryx Inc

[lnofeisone]

Anyone following this? Took a 30% cut today. I'm hoping for more selling (similar to what happened to Tableau few years back) but this one is definitely on the radar. After security products, data science is probably not far behind in terms of demand.

 

Product: Probably the best ETL/BI/Analytics tool on the market for mid-range data science. Small learning curve (when compared to others), easy to deploy, integrate, and automate.

 

No clear competitors but competes with:

Paid - Tableau, Qlik, Altair, Informatica, Microstrategy, SAP, Datameer.

Free - Pentaho, Knime, Orange (any others?). Python and R, or any programming language I suppose. All of these are a pain if working on end-to-end data science product.

 

I (sadly?) used all of these and with the exception of some special case would recommend Alteryx for just about any data-related issue. Except when price is an issue because Alteryx is very expensive.

[RichardGibbons]

Yeah. For background, I bought a bunch of this a few years ago in the $25-$30 range.  I sold most of it in the $120 range back in April when I decided that it was likely to be hit by the pandemic worse than most other tech companies, and the rest today.

 

IMO, it's pretty hard to sustain a P/S ratio about 20 when unprofitable, and growth plummets to the low double-digits, or even negative. While I agree with you about its competitive position, I have a hard time imagining its growth re-accelerating in the next couple quarters.

 

I feel like if you're the VP in charge of technology, it's unlikely your budget is expanding as the broader business is under pressure from the pandemic. And if you're in charge of that budget, it's more likely to me that you're using that budget (and your attention) on playing defense and keeping the business running during unusual times--Zooming, improving your VPNs for work from home, generally improving your security to ensure that people can work from everywhere. You probably aren't focused on offence, using your data to optimize the business. (Yeah, there are defensive use-cases for Alteryx, but I think mostly they're lower priority than other use-cases.)

 

So, I'm sitting this one out for a bit. I think the long term story is intact, but the next little while could be bumpy.  I'd be willing to hold, waiting for the long term, but not at a 20 P/S when the company's unprofitable.

[lnofeisone]

Definitely agree that the next few quarters will be very bumpy as these services are definitely in line after security and mobility. I wouldn't be surprised to see it go down 50% from here. At least that's where I'd feel a bit more comfortable buying.

[RichardGibbons]

I wouldn't be surprised to see it go down 50% from here. At least that's where I'd feel a bit more comfortable buying.

 

Funny--that's the level I was thinking about too.