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

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#161

Post by qwert-e » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

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…

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

In that case you may be interested in Dash (dash.plot.ly). It’s a free and open source library that you can use to create dashboards online with Python only.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#162

Post by basch » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #142

ben_jones wrote: post #121

I'm responsible for external salesforce integrations at my company, this is a really critical acquisition. Salesforce feature categories are surprisingly easy to compete with (be it LeadSourcing, Pipeline Management, 3rd Party App distribution, Licensing, Performance, Design, etc.) because they do a relatively average job at each of them. There are dozens of competitors springing up, many of whom target one of these…

Honestly, while doing some business analyst job for a company, the higher up keep on bringing Salesforce as something we should consider for a B2C project. Their marketing force is something to recon - and the lack of basic knowledge about what they wanted to put on the market was frightening. So, they’re not the best? People don’t seem to think clearly about this :(

Sometimes its easier to buy the second best at everything, (caught Microsoft) and benefit from everything supposedly working together, and a clear cohesive overall roadmap, than trying to stitch 200 individual products together, make them all pass data to each other naively, and hope that their feature changes and roadmaps stay aligned.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#163

Post by frostyj » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

Tableau might be friendly to analysts/end users, but its a piece of at the back end. The linux version they released is no more than a wrapper of original C code into JVM and thus causing huge performance issues and memory leaks. Being that said GL CRM

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#164

Post by anonu » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't.

To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.

To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that "just work".

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#165

Post by basch » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:22 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?

Imagine how useless an airline website would be if it were non interactive reports of all the data for the day loaded onto one page. Good dashboards are interactive, not passive reports.

>This change in approach could be equated to going to individual airline websites to check routes, dates, times and fares of flights as opposed to just going to a website like Orbitz or Travelocity – punching in where I want to go and when, and it pulls in a report of all the flights that meet my criteria. I can then narrow those results down by a number of criteria – time of day, number of stops, price, etc. It’s self-service reporting in the truest form.

https://portal.key2act.com/Blog/2017/07/Power-BI-choose-cons...

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#166

Post by mmckelvy » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

gerhardi wrote: post #13

rotten wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Is it effective to query across different data sources / SaaS services without first aggregating all the data in some sort of data warehouse?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#167

Post by phonon » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #41

prepend wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerBI wants to be Tableau based on the number of times Microsoft sales has demoed and whatnot. But I haven’t met databiz people who switched from tableau to PBI. I’m not sure why as they look pretty similar on paper. I think Tableau’s mental model is about exporting and storytelling while PBI is about reporting. Personally, I find it harder to work with PBI because it’s the only license model more confusing that Ta…

This - we had power pivot in excel - then for some licensing reasons we didn’t. I know how to buy excel and firms buy it blindly - tie power bi into that sales channel

They took it out of Office Pro 2016 for some reason, but it's back in Office Pro 2019. (And 365)

https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/where-is-power-pivo...

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#168

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #120

dougmwne wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 analysi…

The typical business user wants nothing to do with Python or R. Those are nice features, but not really where the bulk of the market is.

[deleted]

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#169

Post by hammock » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

mariushn wrote: post #96

dmor wrote: post #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 ope…

Feedback on your homepage, https://meltano.com/ There's no single visual on it :( Please show what kind of results one can get with this product. Contrast with https://www.tableau.com/ , which has a sample graph and "See it in action" right at beginning.

Here we all are in the comments complaining about how all the focus is on front end instead of fixing the back end, and one of the first comments to a legit alternative is "yeah so what's it look like?" !!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#170

Post by ben_jones » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #142

ben_jones wrote: post #121

I'm responsible for external salesforce integrations at my company, this is a really critical acquisition. Salesforce feature categories are surprisingly easy to compete with (be it LeadSourcing, Pipeline Management, 3rd Party App distribution, Licensing, Performance, Design, etc.) because they do a relatively average job at each of them. There are dozens of competitors springing up, many of whom target one of these…

Honestly, while doing some business analyst job for a company, the higher up keep on bringing Salesforce as something we should consider for a B2C project. Their marketing force is something to recon - and the lack of basic knowledge about what they wanted to put on the market was frightening. So, they’re not the best? People don’t seem to think clearly about this :(

I would NOT recommend it unless you have deep pockets for syncing to a 3rd party database like Amazon RDS or Heroku connect. Mostly because your database schema will go to shit real fast either because business users will modify it arbitrarily or because you'll struggle to understand the performance implications / indexing requirements of various Salesforce tooling.

Bad Database Schema === Bad Time