When I call Alberto Guisande he is at his desk drinking mate tea. It is 9am in Panama and yet as he sits under the watchful eye of a Spiderman figurine – more about that later – he looks like he has already got through a good day’s work. 

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The Alteryx ACE has been living in the Central American country for the last twenty years, having moved here from his native Argentina, after a year working in Barcelona and Boston. Along with his business partner, he runs an analytics firm with offices in Mexico, Chile and Canada as well as his adopted country.

A happy accident

Like so many in his field, Alberto got into data analytics “by accident”. 

“I started my career at Bank of America,” he says. “I was always part of the electronic banking department. I started as a low-level manager and made it up to vice president. When I was there, I was lucky enough to have a boss that thought I had a set of skills that he wanted me to explore in terms of management. He offered to invest in my development. When someone wants to invest in you, you can’t say no. Being curious is one of your principal assets as a professional.”  

It is a belief that has taken Alberto a long way. He quickly developed his career around the building and development of high performance teams across the bank before he moved into other industries around supply chain and logistics. 

When an opportunity came up to “try to put some order on projects” for a Business Intelligence service that had lost its way a little, Alberto couldn’t resist the challenge. 

He helped to knock the company back into shape and while working there, he came across Tableau. Together with a colleague, he decided to find out more. Both could see the software’s potential and within months, they established the first Tableau partner in Panama.  

“I was always on the other side,” he says. “I was a customer or a manager consuming data, getting reports, asking questions and making decisions around the analysts’ reports. I was never the data manipulator myself. But I was close to it and so I really got into that world by chance.”

Discovering the power of Alteryx

Shortly after the foundation of his company, he was faced with a challenging project for a new client.

“I had to come up with this project in fifteen days,” recalls Alberto. “I said to myself that I need three R programmers to make predictive models and so on. A few days beforehand we had been to our first Tableau Partner Conference and I was looking through some of the stuff we had brought back from it when I saw this little blue logo. I decided to take a look.”

The Alteryx website told him everything he needed to know and he quickly made contact.

After a little back and forth, which included a conversation with the burgeoning company’s business development manager and a forty-five minute induction, the Argentinian knew he had found what he needed. That was late 2014. Since then, Alberto and Alteryx have been inseparable.

A one-person army of data

“Bottom line, I was able to develop that model in ten days,” he recalls. “So I had five days to spare and that’s how Alteryx came into my life.”

“It made me a one-person army of data,” he continues. “I was able to manage production projects by myself in a very short time with a lot less effort.” 

“One of the most appealing functionalities of Alteryx is that you can do everything you can do in Excel but easily and I think that’s the first impression that people get with it. It’s like ‘oh I don’t have to write these daunting formulas, I can do it with just a drag and drop’. Definitely, as you go up the chain it gets more difficult but that first impression is very appealing for most people.”

In 2015, just as the Alteryx community was getting off the ground, he was honoured with the title of ACE. He is pretty sure it was because he knew “all of the tools” the software has to offer. Not something everyone could claim, certainly not seven years ago.

“You have to remember, back then there were no data architects really. Big Data didn’t exist as a concept, even though we managed huge amounts of data but they didn’t exist at that point.”

For the Alteryx User Group Ireland on June 23rd, Alberto will join his fellow ACE and friend Esther Cohen to present Thirty Tips in Thirty Minutes. It promises to be a rip-roaring session of great insights and is not to be missed.

Before we finish, I ask him about that Spiderman figure above his head.

“I have a parallel career drawing comic books,” he says. “I’m an illustrator.”

He is a man of many talents and we can’t wait to hear from him.

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