Tableau stock down almost 50%

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making.<p>I&#x27;ve been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases.<p>Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and ask them what they use for analysis and if they say &quot;Good Data&quot; or &quot;MicroStrategy&quot;, I know my job will be a pain in the ass to get done. Its as if you&#x27;re interviewing for an engineering job and they say &quot;oh we all use NotePad here&quot;. Its night and day in terms of productivity.<p>I don&#x27;t know what this means in terms of the stock, but all I can say is that I vouch for the product and think it has a lot of room to grow (from a BI perspective).

Though the outcome is a bit worse than I think most predicted, this has been telegraphed since about November of last year. Tableau has had a very high short interest ratio for sometime, everyone was expecting poor results.<p>What really exacerbated their issue was that they didn&#x27;t get out in front of this and let people know how bad they were going to miss. So when they released earnings everything went to shit on them.<p>I can&#x27;t really find any excuse for this that passes Occam&#x27;s razor except to assume this is a very rookie CFO &#x2F;CEO combo in charge.<p>I made a comment about 3 months ago saying that 2010-2014 were very kind to new tech IPO&#x27;s and 2016 would be the year that companies would have to either make money or face the consequences.<p>I&#x27;m following this over the next 2 weeks to see what the stock does. Its now a pretty good Pre-Merger Arbitrage(take over candidate) candidate.<p>- Market cap under 5 Billion, check<p>- Institutional owner ship &gt; 50%, check<p>- Insiders hold less than 5% of the company, check,in fact its at 1.09%, wow, management doesn&#x27;t even want to own the company!<p>- below its IPO price, not yet, that was $31 but its still falling.

I don&#x27;t know what Tableau Software is and I found it pretty amazing that when I Google it I could still not figure it out because all the results were about the stock price. I think people might be focusing too much on stock price is Googling a company&#x27;s name doesn&#x27;t result in seeing the company&#x27;s website on the first page of results.....

Linkedin is down 38%. Tesla is down quite a bit. My guess is that some VCs were leveraged and had to liquidate positions. Free money from leverage does not look as good when equities go down... I think we are heading for a most violent year on the markets. Pharma and biothechs will most likely be the only bright spots, especially anti-anxiety drugs... :-)<p>Keep plugging at building great software that actually helps make this a better place. Charge for it so you can survive this downturn. It&#x27;s a cycle, this will weed out the nonsense.

&quot;Tableau Software tumbled 36% after management warned it was unlikely to realize benefits of certain tax assets. The news sent shares spiralling despite the software company&#x27;s better-than-expected quarter. The company earned 33 cents a share, more than double estimates.&quot;<p>Also their growth is down.

Tableau is a decent product, but a decent product doesn&#x27;t make a great company. Main issues are:<p>A) Its sales team sells it as an end-to-end analytics suite, but in nearly all actual implementations I&#x27;ve seen companies just use it for management to view a dashboard... essentially just a slightly fancier version of the Excel doc some analyst used to mail out<p>B) It&#x27;s crazy expensive for what it is<p>C) If the company has actual data scientists onboard then those individuals can do far better analysis just using free open source tools<p>For the above reasons and more I&#x27;ve seen a lot of large companies that are far less excited by Tableau than they were a year or two ago. They&#x27;ve either halted larger roll outs that were planned or just moved away from the platform entirely. That leads to softer sales and slams the brakes on growth rates... hence why the stock has tanked. There&#x27;s also the issue of valuation multiples against their financials which are also still frothy, even after the latest downward movement in the stock.

Before this drop they were trading at 14x forward revenue; now they&#x27;re at 7x. Splunk was at 12x, now at 9.7x. We&#x27;ll have to revisit what the typical multiple range is for BI&#x2F;enterprise saas companies.<p>Seems like quite the correction for an earnings beat and the removal of a ~50M deferred tax asset though, especially since people already had negative expectations before the earnings release.

Tableau is definitely a useful tool. Tried getting folks with Tableau skills in previous whoishiring post. The other positions I posted got a lot of response but not the Tableau-oriented ones. Looks like plenty of enthusiasts in this thread through. Where were you all? Hey, in the off chance you are Iinterested in working in Tableau at a think tank (RAND) send me (Chris) a note at dev.hiring@rand.org.

Honestly I don&#x27;t care about stock rhetoric, it&#x27;s an awesome product I use every week. I evaluated lot&#x27;s of BI&#x27;s options because it&#x27;s a pricey product and I&#x27;m super happy with it, Tableau is actually fun (because its so easy yet powerful) and meaningful. The only other decent alternative was Qlik but it was more pricey for the options I needed.

I wonder how that will affect this:<p>&quot;Tableau confirms big Kirkland expansion, plans to hire 1,000&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;tableau-confirms-big-kirkland-expansion-plans-to-hire-1000&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;tableau-conf...</a>

I can hack d3js. Can crunch billions of records in a flash of the eye, can wrangle most any DB (NoSQL, et al) out there, why would I need Tableau?<p>Answer: We want someone stable! Not some crazy hacker. Plus if we don&#x27;t spend the cash, we don&#x27;t have it in our budget next year.<p>Oh, I get it now. :-)

The analytics space is over-crowded.<p>Software eats the world and the education system. It&#x27;s becoming increasingly easy to find developers. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gh-prod-ruby-images.s3.amazonaws.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;image&#x2F;file&#x2F;39&#x2F;github_repositories-800x447.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gh-prod-ruby-images.s3.amazonaws.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;image&#x2F;f...</a><p>To some extent, companies might be trying to use too much data? Who knows.<p>Life Time Value capture in the analytics space is sufficiently difficult. Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re an analytics customer:<p>Early stage customer: Use any one of the 100 integrations analytics companies listed on segment.com&#x27;s website. You DO NOT need to track hundreds of parameters. Conversations with customers have 100x the value of tracking the small things at this stage....usually.<p>Mid-Stage Customer: Maybe you choose one of the 100 companies that makes the most sense. You start paying for it.<p>Having these early and midstage companies as customers is tough. The vast majority of them fail.<p>Big Customer: SnowPlow Analytics? Splunk? Tableau?<p>That being said, I think there&#x27;s businesses to be built, but only semblances of unicorns and minotaurs.<p>15,000 web and mobile apps are coming out tomorrow. What % of them are analytics related applications? (Hint: A larger one than you might think). Just have a gander at the applications that are listed on promotehour.com and startuplister.com&#x27;s list of app launch sites. There&#x27;s now 100+ launch sites.<p>To win big in VC money, you have to take risks, the analytics space seems well established with a slew of best practices that are extremely well known. Ie. not risky enough to warrant pouring VC-istan money into.

Devops everywhere celebrate.

Atlassian is currently down 23%.

New Relic also down by 25%, crazy day for Silicon Valley.

I use Tableau almost daily. Initially I found it harder to work with and avoided it for a while. On 2nd attempt, for some reason, everything clicked into place and I now find it fairly intuitive. Some of my opinions&#x2F;experiences about it:<p>- Beyond simple queries, it becomes more easier to setup a view or two behind Tableau than to do it purely in Tableau. E.g. multiple level of latest times, more complex aggregations etc are more easily done in SQL than via Tableau.<p>- For some things Tableau doesn&#x27;t do what we typically expect. Couple of examples:<p>- If you run a custom query joining two tables with some of the column names being same in both, Tableau cannot deal with it. Setting alias for columns using &quot;as&quot; works fine in SQL so I think it is not unreasonable to expect that to work.<p>- I recently tried to chart lag in request&#x2F;response in microseconds. The data is stored as TIMESTAMP in our Vertica database. However, I found that Tableau doesn&#x27;t show time more granular than seconds. That is kind of odd in today&#x27;s common low-latency high-performance technology environment<p>Having said that, I really like the features it offers viz. Calculated fields which don&#x27;t go away just because I change the data source, drag-and-drop dashboard constructions, very nice visualizations etc.

I was previously a Tableau expert at my then job. I was amazed at the missed opportunities by Tableau to make it indispensable to organizations. The core product was fine but it seemed like they could use a good PM to implement features around sharing, permissions, pricing etc. $1000 license for clients to view some basic report in a browser, the other option being a desktop installed reader.

Could it also be affected by the Amazon QuickSight preview that is going live?

There are several factors at play. I believe one of them is MS Power BI catching up.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;powerbi.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;gartner-positions-microsoft-as-a-leader-in-bi-and-analytics-platforms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;powerbi.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;gartner-positions-m...</a>

Looker is a much better product.

I&#x27;m sure Tableau has its own right place in the plateau of BI &amp; Analytics for big companies. As for small businesses and custom-built analytics as well as for operational data UIs you&#x27;ll probably have no alternative than hacking it yourself with d3js. Or using it Tadaboard-like alternatives.

I was one of the first people to start using Tableau, I even bought a license for my own use so I can learn (Yep sick of the 14 day trial), but these days Excel &#x2F; Power BI does most the work, Salesforce with Wave is competing with them plus so many open source software.

About 5 minutes of searching shows me that Tableau has had a massive growth of revenue, but a slightly more massive growth in sales&#x2F;administrative expenses. What that tells me is this: The market <i>loves</i> Tableau, and keeps buying more of it. But the company has serious cost control problems in its sales and marketing departments, and has expanded there far too fast.<p>Anybody comparing typical open source or low cost BI solutions favorably to Tableau hasn&#x27;t used it, or doesn&#x27;t value their own time. Tableau is easy <i>and</i> deep.<p>Tableau&#x27;s board needs to attack their out-of-control cost of sales (the pay-me-everything egos), and hopefully ignore the internet idiot mob effect on their stock price.<p>I don&#x27;t own Tableau stock. I just like the product.

I was an early adopter of Tableau and fairly enthusiastic. But then I had a truly terrible licencing experience with them and have, since, refused to have ANYTHING to do with them.<p>Nice enough software, but a sleazy organisation. Use one of the other good alternatives.

huge corrections under way, guarantee this is not the end, just the beginning.<p>unicorn slaughter.<p>upside: expect house prices in the SF bay area to become more affordable.

Reporting --&gt; Chartio, Sisense, Looker etc. (anything web focused without a desktop version pretty much)<p>Analysis --&gt; Ipython<p>No room for Tableau and similar.

Tableau is a great product, but it&#x27;s very expensive, like Oracle expensive. I used Saiku to hack together some BI dashboards for free <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meteorite.bi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meteorite.bi&#x2F;</a>. It did the job with a little bit of work.

Just curious whether anyone (else) here has experience with Bime? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bimeanalytics.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bimeanalytics.com&#x2F;</a>

Interesting that Microstrategy also is down quite a bit.

To be fair the markets are really getting beat down today. e.g. LinkedIn is down 45% from $194.

Apologies if the following is ignorant:<p>My exp with tableau was always that they obfuscate the final query...<p>Fuck that.<p>Looker doesn&#x27;t &amp;&amp; they even allow a meta Lang on top of them.<p>So for you to say &quot;just do X&quot; leaves many less sophisticated orgs left in the dark.<p>So my comment is both:<p>Fuck their position and yours.<p>I don&#x27;t want to pay bullshit fees to tableau (with perf hits) &amp;&amp; not be able to see the final query &amp;&amp; not need an actually fairly highly competent DBA to know that x+x+x needs to be enabled in order for me to get to root.<p>If I pay service X give me the full fucking understanding as to how service results are generated.<p>(Yes yes I do understand how saas blah blah works and I&#x27;m just saying I personally find this process bullshit and immoral)