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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#201

Post by yuy910616 »

chasd00 wrote: post #138
LyndsySimon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once accidentally spawned a five-person department at a Fortune 50 company because I threw together a Django app that integrated with Active Directory and dynamically displayed a few reports that were relevant to the logged-in user's role in the organization. I was in Corporate Strategy, and one of the C-level execs saw it. They realized that I could add new reports in a few days by myself instead of going through…

"I left shortly after IT discovered they'd been cut out of the loop on a critical business process and demanded that the whole system be rewritten in C#." been there, done that. you have to get them on the phone early and do the whole "oh you're so great" song and dance to prevent ego bruising.

wow...this is exactly what we're doing right now

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#202

Post by ineedasername »

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.

My interpretation of the rise of tools like Looker & Tableau is that they happened in part because of that '07-'08 acquisition spree. Neither IBM not SAP capitalized on their investments, and instead their products mostly stagnated. Cognos 11 for example looks more modern bit really isn't much more than a re-skin of a product that hasn't changed much since the release of 8.x. At some point IBM had a Watson-branded product that was supposed to be a Tableau competitor, but it never really materialized and was near completely divorced from Cognos.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#203

Post by woodgrainz »

moate wrote: post #105
okr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the begin of an even bigger wealth creation period. "And why did i not invest earlier?"

Or maybe neither, and just a weird factoid about a corporate acquisition that wasn't indicative of any larger market trends. (All possibilities now hedged).

NP complete?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#204

Post by reilly3000 »

ineedasername wrote: post #193
freewilly1040 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Salesforce is a sales organization par excellence. They sell whatever they have, be it social media monitoring, CPQ, marketing automation, Heroku, Jigsaw data, IoT etc. they develop deep wallet share in large accounts and are constantly cross-selling. Their core audience is business people, and that is in stark contrast with GCP which is almost entirely dev focused. I’m not saying CRM is an afterthought but they have plenty of accounts that don’t use their CRM.

That said, Google has deep inroads with their apps suite, and it’s really a race to have their tech run business processes. That and their ecosystem like Insightly are making big inroads to CRM’s SBM market.

Their analytics is shit, but I think the important thing here is that they know their audience very well, and business people love Tableau.

They bought $15B worth of sales leads for cross selling their portfolio of services.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#205

Post by xauronx »

chasd00 wrote: post #123

this is a vote of no confidence for the Salesforce Einstein Analytics ( formally Wave analytics ) product. I suspect over the next couple years you'll see Einstein Analytics phased out in favor of Tableau with a SF stylesheet applied and framed inside Salesforce. On the other hand, the IOT team at SF probably loves this. I got to spend a few days with the main engineers discussing their "Thunder" architecture a coupl…

I thought the engineering behind some of that stuff was pretty cool too. Unfortunately, a system that prides itself on handling millions of records a second AND has no version control AND is sold as "no technical skills needed" is just too scary for me to recommend to anyone.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#206

Post by oarabbus_ »

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…

>is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't.

Is that fully accurate, though?

Where does that leave data scientists / data analysts? I know SQL very well, and I know python's data stack (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, plotly, seaborn, various stats toolkits). I have a strong understanding of the "programming ecosystem" i.e. concepts, terms, definitions, and so on. I understand (basic) computer architecture, I've used and am familiar with (basic) shell/terminal, and services like Docker/Heroku on the command line, and can certainly use GUI cloud tools for AWS, GCP, etc. I can read and understand code and how systems fit together. I've worked alongside engineers of all types.

But I'm not a software engineer. I don't tell people I "program" because my strongest skill is SQL and generally people do not refer to that as "programming".

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#207

Post by kfk »

orky56 wrote: post #185
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.

In business analytics backend > frontend. If you are a business analyst you want all your data at your finger tips + the ability of running somewhat complex transformations and calculations. You also need to be able to validate data with your own rules, because you can't always trust data from warehouses and other sources. Then you want to take all your work and schedule it, so it runs automatically and refreshes all the reports depending on it. Finally, you want triggers on data changes/updates and good looking email notifications with screenshots, attachments, etc.. Of all of the above, end users might only see the dashboards, pdf's or Excel's on the frontend part. If you have a solid backend, you will be able to serve your customers at multiple times the speed and with a lot more insightful reports. At that point the difference between a Tableau dashboard (which does look good) and, say, Superset (which does not look as good) is somewhat negligible.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#208

Post by ineedasername »

exabrial wrote: post #11

Can't wait to pay $1000 per gigabyte per month to host my analytics data there.

Yeah, Salesforce presentation of pricing really can feel like a bait-and-switch. Advertised as a pay per-user per-month, but then to actually make the system work you get all of these add-on fees, like for storage, or for API calls to perform data integration, etc.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#210

Post by bosie »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #200
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?

My guess is this, since we are talking about tableau: https://vega.github.io/vega/
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