Big-data analytics company Alteryx Inc. revealed today that it’s buying the cloud-based “data wrangling” technology specialist Trifacta Inc. for $400 million in cash.

The acquisition is aimed at helping Alteryx accelerate its own journey to the cloud and bring it access to more enterprise buyers.

Alteryx sells so-called extract, transform and load or ETL tools that are used to prepare companies’ data for analysis. Its platform offers baked-in connectivity to business intelligence tools such as Experian and Tableau. It also features specialized capabilities such as data mining, data cleansing and geospatial analytics.

Trifacta is to all intents and purposes very similar, selling tools that enterprises can use to whip information into shape for a variety of purposes, be that simple analysis or training artificial intelligence models. By some accounts, data preparation can consume up to 80% of a data scientist’s time, and the massive volumes of data needed for machine learning and deep learning analysis can overwhelm the budgets of all but the largest firms.

Trifacta’s Wrangler workbench uses machine learning itself to scour datasets, identify likely modifications and either make changes automatically or flag them for human attention. Trifacta Chief Executive Adam Wilson told SiliconANGLE in a 2019 interview the company can reduce data preparation times by as much as 90%.

The key attraction for Alteryx, it seems, is Trifacta’s “cloud-first capabilities” that help businesses to tap into modern data architectures built on cloud data warehouses, as well as numerous software-as-a-service apps, more quickly.

Alteryx CEO Mark Anderson said Trifacta possesses “highly skilled, cloud-first engineering, product and go-to-market teams” that will benefit his own company. He said the plan is to combine Alteryx’s low-code analytics platform with Trifacta’s cloud-native capabilities to provide more flexible deployment options that span on-premises, cloud and multicloud.

“Together, Trifacta and Alteryx expand our total addressable market with additional opportunities to target new data and cloud transformation initiatives for Global 2000 customers,” he said. “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.”

Analyst Doug Henschen of Constellation Research Inc. said that at first glance, Alteryx buying Trifacta might seem like a bit of an overlap, given it has strong data-prep capabilities of its own. However, he said he sees a lot of value for Alteryx in Trifacta’s close relationship with Google LLC, as the supplier of Google DataPrep, as well as Trifacta’s popularity with data engineers. That contrasts with Alteryx, which is generally more popular with analytics and data science professionals.

“Trifacta is a SaaS solution, which could help accelerate Alteryx’s move into cloud services,” Henschen continued. “From another perspective, Trifacta was the last independent self-service data-prep vendor standing following DataRobot’s acquisition of Paxata in 2019. Since most BI and analytics vendors have introduced their own self-service data prep capabilities, that really sapped the growth potential for Trifacta.”

Alteryx said the acquisition is subject to customer closing conditions but should be completed before the end of the first quarter.

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