Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

Post by kradroy » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #103

cujic9 wrote: post #65

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." This deal makes a lot of sense for Salesforce. They should be (and are) on an acquisition spree. 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.

Interestingly, I think an earlier version of the title had "in all-stock deal", but I think the mods removed it. I wish they hadn't, as that's an important detail for the reasons you mention. (Also, ask James Baker, who was convinced by Goldman Sachs to sell Dragon Naturally Speaking in an all-stock deal ... of a company that turned out to be the Belgian Enron.)

Post by chrisjc » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

woodgrainz wrote: post #69

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.

Indeed, it's cyclical. About 7 years ago there was a social media platform buying spree. Salesforce bought Radian6 and Buddy Media (for ~$700M). Oracle bought Virtue for $300M. Google made its own acquisitions in the space (Wildfire). But now, Salesforce now has a bigger war chest to play with. Looks like BI is the new hotness.

Post by thehappypm » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

iamgopal wrote: post #86

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. Ultimately my take is, small business usually take…

Post by basch » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #113

will_brown wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. You make it sound like the ticker symbol justifies a $15.7B price tag...

I didn’t intend that, but searching for reasons for such a high value. I think we are many years away from $15B vanity ticket symbols.

Post by kfk » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

remus wrote: post #156

kfk wrote: post #141

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). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

> the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). Other than the expensive part, is it really such a bad thing? I feel like relational databases are a pretty good fit for a wide set of use cases and have a huge amount of tooling.