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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#222
post #106
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a clueless boss fucking around with some kind of SQL variant in Tableu, not having a clue what he was doing then asking me for help.

At my last job I had a nontechnical boss, and I would have been ecstatic if he had a) enough of a clue to try screwing around with SQL, and b) the wisdom and humility to ask for help.

Yeah, I occasionally have to visit folks and walk them through extremely basic things like sorting data in Excel and creating pivot tables (very much not my job, I'm general purpose BI development mixed with statistical analysis & ML) but I never begrudge those meetings because it means the user is trying to become empowered to work more independently. No matter the specific skill level, that's something I can get behind.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#223
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.

plotly aint exactly free, you get 25ish free plot and then you gotta pay.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So is Google making a play for Saleforce’s core business? I don’t know a lot about the details of what Salesforce does but from my view it looks like there is not that much overlap

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#225
post #31

Last week Looker, today Tableau, next week Qlik or Alteryx? I wonder how this will integrate with Einstein and other AI products salesforce already has. Pardot is the first to come to mind. They already own Heroku, Mulesoft, and Quip. Exciting times to be a data geek. Hopefully this adds more money to the AI race.

yeah I see Alteryx or something similar as their next purchase. All they are missing now is a ETL solution.

What do you call Mulesoft?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So how many seats are needed to hire somebody who creates a custom shiny + R app that does exactly what you want? How big is the average company that makes use of tableau etc.? Let's do the math ...

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#227
post #177

I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students. Tableau feels more polished than PowerBI although BI has pretty much reached feature parity with Tableau. The problem is the licensing costs. PowerBI is very affordable ($10 a month) while Tableau is not($70 and UP). Tableau is basically saying, unless you have a corporation paying for the license err SAAS subscription do not bother to use us.…

Tableau is free for students and teachers. (1 year license) https://www.tableau.com/academic/students. It's not crippled.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#228
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.

My guess is that Salesforce was also in the race to acquire Looker, and since that fell through they picked up Tableau because they had sunk the work into acquiring a data visualization company. The timing is uncanny, but the price tag is vastly different.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#229

Salesforce appears increasingly worried about being pigeonholed as a CRM product and wants to ride the data wave and be seen as a data product. I’m not sure this acquisition makes a lot of sense though. The Tableau fad seems to be fading as people realize that while it’s a nice glorified Excel it doesn’t really solve the data issues most companies have. It seems like a very high price for a product that may be past i…

The bloom may be off the rose with Tableau, but I'm not sure I understand the "glorified Excel" comment. Sure, Excel has charts and pivot tables that might have something comparable in any single visualization in Tableau, but its inherently non-relational and single data source, where Tableau is made to mash up data from multiple sources for exploration and creation of interactive dashboards, something Excel doesn't really do very well, if at all.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True I'll give you it depends on the situation and might indeed be the better option. For a startup I wouldn't recommend it at least
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