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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#21
post #14
post #7

I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it?

It’s a very good data exploration tool. Likely the best out there. But don’t sleep on aws QuickSight

I was going through a QuickSight presentation and looks like it's up to 90% cheaper than Tableau!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#22
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.

Otherwise, it will be hard to justify this high markup for a tool company.

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.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#23
post #9
post #7

I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it?

It is what Excel should have evolved into. I still think Microsoft should have bought them and merged it into Excel.

I think PowerBI compares with Tableau quite favorably. For the most part PowerBI is a clone of Tableau, but it goes farther and adds in much more powerful scripting(M, Python, R), a library of custom visuals, Power Query which is a nice GUI for data transformation, and deep formula language (DAX). I think it's easy for an Excel or Tableau user to pick up in a day, but it scales much more as you have more data analysis expertise.

Also MS has been improving it like crazy over the past few years. They clearly want to maintain their dominance in the data analysis space, but see the winds shifting away from Excel and are not waiting to become irrelevant.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#24
post #7

I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it?

> I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it? It's really easy for business users to point it at a database and get started on their own, exploring the data. It feels like it has a much lower barrier to entry than many other reporting tools. And once you win the hearts of executives, that's kind of the end of that discussion. It's a really sticky produc…

I remember a clueless boss fucking around with some kind of SQL variant in Tableu, not having a clue what he was doing then asking me for help.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it? It's really easy for business users to point it at a database and get started on their own, exploring the data. It feels like it has a much lower barrier to entry than many other reporting tools. And once you win the hearts of executives, that's kind of the end of that discussion. It's a really sticky produc…

Also, the business users can combine data sources and do joins. Instead of waiting for IT to produce the right views.

Business users don't usually have a clue what a join is.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#26
post #17

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? 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,…

It’s a risky play. At my enterprise company, we’re not allowed to use a single vendor for everything, we explicitly must use different companies if a favoured vendor hits a certain spend threshold.

This is to prevent cost overruns and solution capture, where every solution to your company’s problems becomes “give it to X vendor” and then X vendor kills a product line and you’re toast.

Salesforce needs to be careful or else they’ll hit that threshold where companies don’t want to use them because you as a client are too small. Google is facing this problem right now.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#28
post #17

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? 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,…

It’s a risky play. At my enterprise company, we’re not allowed to use a single vendor for everything, we explicitly must use different companies if a favoured vendor hits a certain spend threshold. This is to prevent cost overruns and solution capture, where every solution to your company’s problems becomes “give it to X vendor” and then X vendor kills a product line and you’re toast. Salesforce needs to be careful o…

Interesting! I haven't seen that requirement before, but it does make sense.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#29
post #17

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? 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,…

It is smart. It works the other way too. Tableau customers will see more reasons to switch to Salesforce.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#30
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!

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)

Edit: just wrote a quick post with some open questions I'd like to explore around this deal https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-...

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