So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases).<p>I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting. Python is today the only "glue code" that puts all of it together, from data to insights.
Wow, Looker last week and now Tableau. I’m only 90 days in to running the open source equivalent inside GitLab, and these big revenue multiples are telling a fascinating story. I would’ve loved to be a fly on the wall for this negotiation, what a great outcome for Tableau shareholders!<p>With all that’s happening we’re definitely looking to pick up the pace, and would love to work with more contributors on the free open source alternative at Meltano (www.meltano.com)<p>Edit: just wrote a quick post with some open questions I'd like to explore around this deal <a href="https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-tableau-for-15-7b/" rel="nofollow">https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-...</a>
One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't.<p>To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.<p>To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that "just work".
This seems really high for a company without earnings and a weird growth curve. Their ticker is cool and maybe sales force wants to be DATA on nasdaq.<p>Otherwise, it will be hard to justify this high markup for a tool company.<p>It will be awesome if Salesforce can adjust their model and make Tableau spit out D3. Their desktop tool is nice for designing, but their server components seem frequently unnecessary for running the visualization. The catch is that creating serverless dynamic visualizations isn’t all that money-making and the cool UI/UX design tool is outside of OSS’ wheelhouse.
Salesforce currently has a P/E ratio of 104. The headline might as well read "Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B in Monopoly money."<p>This deal makes a lot of sense for Salesforce. They should be (and are) on an acquisition spree.<p>But if I had stock options (or any kind of locked-up equity) in Salesforce, I'd be worried right now. Someone is going to be left holding the bag.
I love this. Mulesoft, Tableau -- there's a very clear strategy here for Salesforce. You're running all of your customer-facing operations on Salesforce, so why not also integrate the BI stack into everything?<p>I've worked with a lot of companies who spend months (if not years) integrating their data into a few disparate systems... The finance team has one system (and underlying data lake), the commerce team another, the marketing team another... If Salesforce thinks they can run the entire underlying data infrastructure in addition to the actual customer-facing functions, then this is a smart play.
I remember the wave of BI vendor acquisitions in 2007-2008 when IBM acquired Cognos and SAP acquired BusinessObjects. Now, 12 years later the wave repeats. Google is buying Looker. Salesforce is buying Tableau, and probably Qlik will be acquired within the next 1-2 years too.
I'm the CPO at a SaaS data catalog and analysis hub company called data.world - I was at the Snowflake Summit when the Looker acquisition by Google was announced - the guys at their booth seemed pretty happy ;)<p>With Google snapping up Looker ($2.6B) for Google Cloud, Salesforce's much bigger purchase of Tableau is a clear sign that the big guys see buying BI tools is a good way to expand the reach of their offerings into more of the business. We talk to companies every day that have made massive investments in data warehouses, viz tools, and high-paid data scientists, but they still aren't agile enough because they can't tie it all together so their people can find and use the right data when they need it. I read an article once about the failure of self serve BI and the reality is that you just end up creating more sprawl. People need tools to reduce the clutter and sprawl and stop the endless chain of emails trying to figure out what table to look at or query to use or if your source is still updating.<p>We built our data catalog and analysis hub for exactly this, and it's extremely validating to see the big guys like Salesforce and Google investing in expanding the user base of big data tools and I really hope we can be part of the solution of sorting it all out!
Oh hey, maybe this will mean somebody at Tableau has to start to give a damn about enterprise features, such as a way to do product activation and registration that doesn't fail completely in non-persistent virtual desktop environments.<p>Or Tableau can continue to pretend that this isn't a real issue and stonewall customers and partners alike.<p>I think the actual visualisation part is neat, and better than many competitors, but many of the server-side parts are various levels of disastrous (as is their support), and their "data preparation" tool needs some serious improvements to be borderline useable.<p>15+ billion seems like a lot to me given how Tableau interacts with customers and partners alike, especially seeing how they are activelly alienating existing enterprise customers, all in favour of new sales, but perhaps something will change for the better here.
this is a vote of no confidence for the Salesforce Einstein Analytics ( formally Wave analytics ) product. I suspect over the next couple years you'll see Einstein Analytics phased out in favor of Tableau with a SF stylesheet applied and framed inside Salesforce.<p>On the other hand, the IOT team at SF probably loves this. I got to spend a few days with the main engineers discussing their "Thunder" architecture a couple years ago. Under the covers it's awesome (great integration of multiple open source technologies) and the "IOT Cloud" UI isn't bad either but they didn't have an answer for data visualization on the scale they built for.<p>on a tangent, while getting into SF's IOT product they were talking about how it was so easy business analyst could set it up (famous last words right?). It's pretty easy to make a mistake and create a billion SF cases ( case is like a trouble-ticket in SF's Service product) in the span of "<i>click</i> -> "oops let me undo that" -> <i>click</i>" hah
If we look at Gartner's Analytics & BI magic quadrant from Feb 2019 (<a href="https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B0238781B1.ashx" rel="nofollow">https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B02387...</a>) it becomes clear that Tableau(Salesforce) & PowerBI(Microsoft) are the driving force in the area.<p>The move to buy Tableau likely comes from an interest in enhancing cross-compatibility between Salesforce+Tableau, the ability to provide a more robust service offering that can compete with Microsoft (e.g. If you buy our CRM solution, we will give you Tableau for a 25% discount) and a concern that another big player would have come in and taken Tableau.
Wow.<p>When we started Graphistry, our view was, "skate to where the puck is going", so while we saw Looker and Periscope burning sales/marketing/dev $$$, the result felt 95% similar to Tabluea Public. Instead, we've focused on figuring out how to harness next gen -- GPUs, how to expose ML and automation, etc. While I still think we are right long-term, and that the cloud co's will be paying top dollar here for the next 5 years.. Short-term, I didn't expect this much market hunger for old-school.<p>Bravo to all the product PMs!
I'm responsible for external salesforce integrations at my company, this is a really critical acquisition. Salesforce feature categories are surprisingly easy to compete with (be it LeadSourcing, Pipeline Management, 3rd Party App distribution, Licensing, Performance, Design, etc.) because they do a relatively average job at each of them. There are dozens of competitors springing up, many of whom target one of these categories as a key selling point.<p>Now if you go into a fortune 500 sales meeting to pitch how much better the analytics stack of your CRM is, they will come back saying that Salesforce is clearly investing to be superior in that category for the long haul.
I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students.<p>Tableau feels more polished than PowerBI although BI has pretty much reached feature parity with Tableau.<p>The problem is the licensing costs.
PowerBI is very affordable ($10 a month) while Tableau is not($70 and UP).<p>Tableau is basically saying, unless you have a corporation paying for the license err SAAS subscription do not bother to use us.<p><a href="https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual" rel="nofollow">https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual</a><p>There was a free option that was pitifuly unused and crippled to cloud only without any exports.<p>Then again by focusing only on companies for whom the licensing costs are a drop in a cloudy ocean Tableau brought in a 16B valuation.
I'm still really interested to see if there's any long term blow back for Salesforce from the whole Camping World saga.<p>Even for people who agree on principle, as a business owner in general I'd be very wary of using software from any 3rd party who's willing to try to influence how I run my own business. It makes me wonder about all of the other companies under that SF umbrella too.
I think that many folks don't remember or know about how the word "BI" [business intelligence] was born.<p>Back in the day corporations paid programmers and consulting companies millions of dollars for the purpose of building out applications with databases upon which to digitize their business processes. This was a great for a couple decades, up until some time in the 90's.<p>It was at that point that expectations had caught up with digitization and having your battle-axes in accounting/order-entry/supply-chain do their keyboard magic on green-screens just wasn't cutting it. To actually understand what was going on, managers had to ask for specific reports from these people and they were just not in a position to do the reports as well has get their own ever-increasing-shit done. Let alone whatever the hell sales was doing.<p>For a control-freak in management this just isn't acceptable. They started to find ways to "serve themselves". Eventually someone had the idea to hook the enterprise databases into their own zany spreadsheets. It was amazing. There was such a fountain of knowledge and insight that it made the people who could do that seem like relative geniuses. Almost "intelligent" in their business jobs. Thus, "Business Intelligence" was born.<p>"Business Intelligence" is the practice of making badly-designed opaque shit from brutal, inscrutable business applications... visible.<p>Only now are makers of enterprise applications starting to get it (or pretend to get it).
I was recruited for one of the first engineering positions at Tableau a very long time ago, but I turned it down as it just wasn't interesting enough. I think I was targetted in part because I was a SIGGRAPH presenter/author as one of the co-founders, Pat Hanrahan, was big into SIGGRAPH. Oh well.<p>It is a great success for a brilliant computer graphics professor: <a href="https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/" rel="nofollow">https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/</a> <a href="http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/" rel="nofollow">http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/</a>
I'm shocked to see this not being a better day for Elastic. While still quite narrow with ELK stack, the elasticsearch backend is something that many more companies can make useful quickly given how non-finicky it is.
Very happy for the Tableau folks, they are great to work with!<p>My firm uses Informatica's IICS to output all of the datasets for Tableau to visualize, its not as exciting as the hundreds of frameworks and languages that do the same but it works reliably and I don't have to hire expensive data scientists to get the job done or switch tech every few years to whatever is the flavor of the month.<p>We take the 80/20 approach that most questions the business asks can be answered with Informatica. The last 20% we save for our developers and the odd data scientist to help us with.
I really really hope this makes Salesforce more like Tableau and not the other way around. Their UX and workflows are atrocious (not that their main competitors' aren't).
At its core, Tableau is an implementation of a really elegant formalism to specify visualizations, and it's much more organized and declarative than something like Grammar of Graphics.<p><a href="http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/" rel="nofollow">http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/</a>
Not very surprising, they have been looking at them for a while.<p><a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-document-listed-tableau-among-salesforces-potential-acquisition-targets/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-docu...</a>
Just for the comparison, salesforce's revenue is ~$13B. At current profit rate, ( including that of tableau ), they can generate $15B in about 30 year, may be 20 year given growth and inflation. I run a small business, I don't think I would be able to generate equivalent of deal, nor my banker/investor allowed such a investment, no matter what growth would look like.<p>Ultimately my take is, small business usually take growth from someone else most of the time ( i.e. new restaurant steal customer from another old customer ), instead of generating brand new growth, while bigger business are actually creating - or - consolidating whole industry for growth in a society-positive way in the long run. ( like uber ).<p>Still somewhere I would wish I can replicate such method of growth for small businesses.
Last week Looker, today Tableau, next week Qlik or Alteryx?<p>I wonder how this will integrate with Einstein and other AI products salesforce already has. Pardot is the first to come to mind. They already own Heroku, Mulesoft, and Quip.<p>Exciting times to be a data geek. Hopefully this adds more money to the AI race.
Looker, Periscope, and Tableau have all been acquired or merged in the last six weeks. Periscope merged with another BI start up Sisense. Looker and Tableau were part of a multibillion dollar acquisitions. It's an interesting time for this space.
I think the value will be created from the data itself, less focus on data-processing skills. Of course, modeling skills will be still important at future, but data-processing would rather become much more easier. That's why self-bi tools like Tableau, Elastic search are becoming more and more popular.<p>I am personally focusing on Metatron Discovery, which is an Open-Sourced Big data analytics platform for citizen scientists.
Link : <a href="https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery</a>
Salesforce appears increasingly worried about being pigeonholed as a CRM product and wants to ride the data wave and be seen as a data product.<p>I’m not sure this acquisition makes a lot of sense though. The Tableau fad seems to be fading as people realize that while it’s a nice glorified Excel it doesn’t really solve the data issues most companies have. It seems like a very high price for a product that may be past it’s peak.<p>That said, we’ll done to the Tableau team for having gone public and then selling the company again at a nice bump.
I can hope they leave them alone, but that's a fools wish. Not looking forward to them stripping away feature after feature, and charging exorbitant per-user prices to get them back.
Anyone know how something like Tableau compares to something like Palantir? I don't have any experience with either but I've heard that Palantir is valued quite high as well.