Tableau files for IPO

Interesting stats from their S-1 (<a href="http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1303652/000119312513138700/d469057ds1.htm" rel="nofollow">http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1303652/00011931251...</a>):<p>- $127.7m 2012 revenue<p>- 749 full time employees at end of 2012<p>- 70% of revenue from product licenses; 30% from services<p>- 11,000 customer accounts<p>- No customer represented more than 5% of total revenue

This is an interesting view to a modern B2B sw licensing business, which is not SaaS. Their Sales &#38; Marketing expenses are about 50% of their revenues, R&#38;D is 25% and administration is 13%. Combined sales and admin costs are 63%. In the previous years, Sales has been a tad above 65% of their revenues and combined sales and admin costs have been above 80%. Quite a drop! What did they do?<p>I assume that BI tools are quite hard to sell, as they require non-trivial amount of integration to existing systems, but it is interesting to compare to this other B2B companies. For example SalesForce's combined sales and administrative costs are 78% of their revenue. Tableau's competitor QlikView has combined sales and admin costs at 75% of their revenue.

Maybe i haven't seen the insides of enough large companies - but watching their demo video, this sort of product seems to glimpse past what LtU call the 'middle-ages' of programming. Like seeing map, fold and CPS for the first time. I spend <i>how</i> much time writing graphs, charts, filters, sql, password reset interfaces by hand for my SaaS with my web stack?<p>The coolest part for me is someone here has what seems like a quite pure software gig, writing interfaces with no real need to care for the underlying business, only for the data adapters. Mostly if you're working with business software the result would be polluted by some specific business logic or domain knowledge.<p>(Excuse the gushing, that video blew me away slightly.)

Title should be renamed to reflect that revenue is $127.7mm, thought this was going to be an article decrying the crazy valuations some tech companies get.

<p><pre><code> "...the idea that companies needed simpler ways to visualize big data and databases." </code></pre> Maybe I'm late to the party but is "big data" now just another way of saying "data"? More and more it seems like anyone who uses a database is mixing it up with "big data".

Do companies, at this stage, announce what the IPO issuing price (or market cap) will be? If so, what is theirs? If not, any guesses what it will be?<p>It is not in Splunk's league, but it is definitely a solid product, with a great growth prospect.

I can't believe the stock symbol "DATA" wasn't taken already.

Woo not a lot of Seattle IPOs!