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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#281

Post by radicalbyte »

sequoia wrote: post #275
kfk wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The businesses are coming with requests that require complex SQL on millions of records of data that normally is sitting in various sources (warehouse, salesforce, etc.). Unless you hire expensive data engineers, you can't do this type of work reliably. You can stick things together with expensive GUI oriented prep tools like Alteryx, but you pay in reliability and, quite frankly, sleep. And forget IT, IT is so stuck…

Isn't the problem space here genuinely complex in terms of business-complexity? Is there some better alternative that doesn't entail some other massive tradeoff such as managing your own servers, creating ingress mechanisms from multiple systems, building your own version of salesforce etc.? In short, is there any solution that "does everything you could possibly want" while ensuring you _never_ need to hire a data e…

Yes it is :)

You have to normalize data taken from various sources of various age and complexity. So you really have to understand the data. You also have to really understand the questions.

I've worked with (and on) lots of these tools and projects; the complexity is never in the frontend, it's dominated by getting the data, getting the data right and into the right format.

If all you want in the end is a good looking dashboard on a website then you might as well build it yourself; because of the cost structure that can even cost less than buying one of the BI frontend tools (there's not a lot of difference in development time, the the BI frontenders are more expensive because they are rarer and the licencing is high).

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#282

Post by oxfordmale »

sixdimensional wrote: post #70
cl42 wrote: post #17

I love this. Mulesoft, Tableau -- there's a very clear strategy here for Salesforce. You're running all of your customer-facing operations on Salesforce, so why not also integrate the BI stack into everything? I've worked with a lot of companies who spend months (if not years) integrating their data into a few disparate systems... The finance team has one system (and underlying data lake), the commerce team another,…

If Salesforce wants to run my entire underlying data infrastructure, I think we’re in trouble. I see this more of a land grab, with SaaS vendors trying to push their own BI stacks and create an even tighter era of lock-in. I don’t think it is necessarily a good thing. Data is an asset and liability - when somebody else has all of yours in their proprietary platform and under the control of their cloud, that is a scar…

Salesforce data is stored in Oracle DBs

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#283

Post by therein »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #214
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…

>well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get…

Out of genuine interest and perhaps even a need for such a solution, is there anything that does what Metabase/Superset/Dash/GDS/ModeAnalytics does but for realtime datastreams? For instance, parsing and recording and visualizing the events coming from a websockets or some event queue/bus?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#284

Post by markus_zhang »

radicalbyte wrote: post #281
sequoia wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the problem space here genuinely complex in terms of business-complexity? Is there some better alternative that doesn't entail some other massive tradeoff such as managing your own servers, creating ingress mechanisms from multiple systems, building your own version of salesforce etc.? In short, is there any solution that "does everything you could possibly want" while ensuring you _never_ need to hire a data e…

Yes it is :) You have to normalize data taken from various sources of various age and complexity. So you really have to understand the data. You also have to really understand the questions. I've worked with (and on) lots of these tools and projects; the complexity is never in the frontend, it's dominated by getting the data, getting the data right and into the right format. If all you want in the end is a good looki…

from my humble experience if you have a sales or product team keeps pumping out spreadsheets in weird formats you need someone dedicating a few hours to get a proper etl, and if they are constantly changing the format or adding new things you need a dedicate person just for that. Modern tools like Python or Power Query are not enough for this eternal war.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#285

Post by oarabbus_ »

therein wrote: post #283
oarabbus_ wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get…

Out of genuine interest and perhaps even a need for such a solution, is there anything that does what Metabase/Superset/Dash/GDS/ModeAnalytics does but for realtime datastreams? For instance, parsing and recording and visualizing the events coming from a websockets or some event queue/bus?

I believe you'd want a tool such as Grafana (which I believe is free/open source), which I have seen eng teams implement for realtime streaming. There is also Kibana which I am less familiar with.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#286

Post by fullshark »

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…

Yep. UX is by far the most underrated aspect of product development by engineers.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#287

Post by yingw787 »

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…

Yea no this is wayyyy underestimating the costs of data engineering. I can tell you from my very limited experience some queries I've seen, on some systems and some datasets, have estimated TTLs in YEARS -- and that's the difference between companies that invest in tooling and infrastructure (and big O analysis during system design) and those that don't. And you will invest a good deal of effort and time and money before you realize it, it's like the perfect ambush.

Never start a land war in Russia, and never neglect your data infrastructure if data is in any way a key business differentiator/fundamental in your market.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#288

Post by tommyderami »

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 actually felt the same way about Salesforce until about a year ago when my company bought it. It certainly has a duplo blocks side that let's non technical users do complex things (aka Excel) but their backed is extensible through a language that is more or less Java for custom handlers/queries/etc and they are switching their front end to W3C compliant web components for developer maintainability after getting burned by rolling their own front end framework in the early angular 1 era. They have super tight integration with heroku postgres dbs (because they own them) and have some other best technical tricks up their sleeve to the point that I my opinion has changed quite a bit.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#290

Post by initself »

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 backend stack of both make development like swimming in glue. The same managers you are referring to cut us over to these tools and we subsequently experienced a massive decline in our business.
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