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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#191

Post by greenyoda »

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…

> I can do the same thing with some scripts...

I thought that the point of Tableau was to provide a tool that end-users (who can't program) could use to interactively explore their data. That's not something you can replicate with a bunch of scripts.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#192

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#193

Post by ineedasername »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #181
reilly3000 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what makes this seem like a strange deal to me. There's pretty much 0 overlap with Google on CRM, and the next comparable tech stack that does compete with them is MS Dynamics CRM combined with Power BI. But Dynamics doesn't appear to be a growing threat for CRM marketshare.

That said, Salesforce (based on my usage ~4 years ago) has truly awful baked-in BI and analytics, necessitating third party products and data engineering to fill that gap. Tableau will fix that, but I'm staggered at the price.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#194

Post by rmk2 »

Oh hey, maybe this will mean somebody at Tableau has to start to give a damn about enterprise features, such as a way to do product activation and registration that doesn't fail completely in non-persistent virtual desktop environments.

Or Tableau can continue to pretend that this isn't a real issue and stonewall customers and partners alike.

I think the actual visualisation part is neat, and better than many competitors, but many of the server-side parts are various levels of disastrous (as is their support), and their "data preparation" tool needs some serious improvements to be borderline useable.

15+ billion seems like a lot to me given how Tableau interacts with customers and partners alike, especially seeing how they are activelly alienating existing enterprise customers, all in favour of new sales, but perhaps something will change for the better here.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#195

Post by nonfamous »

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.

The model isn't that a business user would use Python or R. Rather, a data scientist shares live-computed analytics to business users through a report / dashboard.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#196

Post by taurath »

ineedasername wrote: post #189
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 as…

Those strategic holes are probably worth more to the acquiring company than the price they paid in terms of new revenue.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#197

Post by hinkley »

kyllo wrote: post #188
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).

Now if they just taught business analysts how statistics work.

If I had a dollar for every time someone showed me a wrongheaded graph they were using to make business decisions, I could retire.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#198

Post by selectodude »

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.

Tableau is $850/yr per seat. Very expensive might be overstating things a little.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#199

Post by hadlock »

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?

We were getting ready to do a tableau api/integration with our software and the licensing came out to about $100k for two server dev licences and six client licenses.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#200

Post by oarabbus_ »

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…

What is Vega? I only found the genome browser tool, unless that is what you're referring to?
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