Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B • Hacker News Board

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#71

Post by oxfordmale » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

sailfast wrote: post #48

prepend wrote: post #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 runnin…

A lot of companies use Tableau to visualize their data. In the future if they want to use Tableau they (speculation) might have to host their data in SalesForce and/or be directed to use a number of other SalesForce features if they want the latest coolest dashboards. To me this acquisition seems be a play toward growing customer usage of SalesForce licensed functions and data migration to their cloud, rather than ba…

My company is using Einstein Analytics, however, other than the Salesforce integration has been a terrible disappointing experience. Loading data is a pain and has to be done to a custom API. Of course Einstein analytics need to have it is own language called SAQL resulting in a steep learning curve.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#72

Post by woodgrainz » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #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 runnin…

Very expensive acquisition.

Perhaps in 5 years we'll look back at this move as a prime example of the bubble we're currently in.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#73

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

Gpetrium wrote: post #62

jbob2000 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Although there is a good % of the market that works in a similar way to your business, it is worth noting that when a deal is exceptionally good, executives will create exceptions. MS Suite and some of its satellite offerings (PowerBI,Sharepoint,etc) is a good example of an exception. There are also cases where a company will pick multiple vendors in an attempt to de-risk and/or for negotiating tactics. If you are fu…

> If you are fully dependent on a single vendor, the cost of migrating tends to skyrocket and the negotiating power moves towards the vendor.

This is particularly important with SaaS, as you lack the leverage to walk away. If you're fighting with a vendor, you had best resolve it by your contract date, as they will happily shut you off and wait for you grovel (and pay).

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#74

Post by pier25 » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #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 runnin…

> t will be awesome if Salesforce can adjust their model and make Tableau spit out D3

Can you clarify?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#75

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

ackbar03 wrote: 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 like Access for business people and in many cases gets driven by the business, not IT. In many cases, it cuts out the IT SMEs that govern access to something like business objects.

They also do a good job at seeding it in visible places. Alot of newspapers are using Tableau for infographics, etc.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#76

Post by crescentfresh » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

ackbar03 wrote: post #7

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

At my place, somebody a while back drank the Tableau koolaid and quickly designed some nice looking graphs and sold the commercial team on its value, and the president signed a check for a license.

The software team was then tasked with putting the fancy graphs that guy did into our web application with the following constraints:

- the Tableau server can't be exposed on the public internet

- our UI can't indicate that it's using Tableau anywhere (i.e., use an iframe or something)

This turns out to be tricky. Tableau doesn't really like to be embedded in 3rd party applications, it leaks information about itself in a number of places. It requires that every person looking at the graph be a user according to Tableau's definition of user. Synchronizing authentication to Tableau server and workbook authorization gets tricky.

The next task coming up is that they want users to be able to ad-hoc schedule an email to themselves with the fancy graphs attached as a pdf, so we've got that to look forward to.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#77

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

dgudkov wrote: post #5

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.

[deleted]

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#78

Post by mastry » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

jefe_ wrote: post #16

gerhardi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has PowerBI which is already almost magic for many business users with it's ease of connectability with different databases and SaaS services. Transformations, parsing, mixing data from different sources and reporting capabilities are also easy to start with and quite powerful in the right hands. It's not integrated into Excel directly but sits quite well imho in the MS ecosystem.

Power BI also has a free version that is quite capable. I find the charts easier to work with than Excel.

It's good but the free version doesn't let you share your results.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#79

Post by chenster » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

dgudkov wrote: post #5

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.

Dont' forget Metabase

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#80

Post by em500 » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

ackbar03 wrote: post #7

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

Making fancy graphs beyond standard spreadsheet templates can become time consuming / labour intensive very quickly. More enlightened companies will not hesitate ot pay for Tableau if it relieves their 6-figure salary data scientists from reporting/dashboarding work.