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

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#181

Post by freewilly1040 » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #84

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.

I held Salesforce stock from 2016-18 and it helped us just buy our first home. They have incredible lock-in with a very large and diverse customer base. They now have to defend themselves against Google's purchase of Looker, and the rise of PowerBI.

Are they serving the same market as Google? It seems as though the two are serving different use cases, both of which need data viz. Salesforce gives you a sales database and a front end out of the box, and you can tweak it and add to it with add ons. Google gives you compute and storage, but the application logic is all owned by you.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#182

Post by simonebrunozzi » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

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…

Funny coincidence: I was reading about you in relation to Mattermark, then found your blog post on Meltano, and now I find your comment on HN. You're everywhere! :)

Would it be possible to chat with you about your past experience at Mattermark? I am trying to answer a few questions (not related to the company, but related to VCs and investing). If so, my HN username @ gmail. Thanks!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#183

Post by _sword » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

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.

Few if any institutional investors are looking at CRM on a P/E basis. They're valuing the company usually on EV/Sales and EV/FCF.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#184

Post by dustingetz » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:47 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.

RDBMS = data silo

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#185

Post by orky56 » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:48 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…

Are you referring to APM/infrastructure monitoring, etc.? I was curious to find out if you're thinking BI capabilities need to be just as powerful at the backend as these frontend tools.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#186

Post by infinite8s » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #178

anonu wrote: post #164

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 th…

Are you sure your scripts and web server costs less than Tableau?

Probably not. From his comment I doubt he's even used Tableau (and I say this as a programmer who worked on something similar - https://perspective.finos.org - and yet I still find myself turning to tableau pretty often).

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#187

Post by himlion » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #178

anonu wrote: post #164

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 th…

Are you sure your scripts and web server costs less than Tableau?

Yeah, Tableau is very expensive. Way more than a few weeks of dev time.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#188

Post by kyllo » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

anonu wrote: post #164

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 th…

To put a finer point on it, they'll pay a lot of money for tools that require less-skilled labor to operate. They will gladly spend a lot of money on Tableau to avoid paying the salary premium to have "those who program" build them an analytics system. It costs much less to hire business analysts who don't program (aside from SQL).

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#189

Post by ineedasername » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:55 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…

>This seems really high

Precisely what I thought. It looks like their annual revenue is ~ $1 billion, placing this price around 15x annual revenue.

However, Looker has about $131 million in revenue, so their purchase price was an even higher 20x annual revenue.

My conclusion is that these acquisitions are much less about sales revenue and much more about filling strategic holes in product offerings, and I can only assume it's a sellers market in that area.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#190

Post by finaliteration » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

himlion wrote: post #187

fjsolwmv wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure your scripts and web server costs less than Tableau?

Yeah, Tableau is very expensive. Way more than a few weeks of dev time.

> Way more than a few weeks of dev time.

Except it's not just a few weeks of dev time that makes up the overall cost. Consider infrastructure, maintenance, updates, support, training, etc,. Those things start to add up and you don't get the benefit of scale/community if you do it on your own. There's also the opportunity cost of building your own system when you could buy something existing and use that time to work on other things.