So what does this mean to Tableau using BI analysts out there? does it add values to my tableau certifications?
Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
231–240 of 387 posts
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
You make it sound as if this were a bad thing. RDBMS work well for many use cases. There are plenty of tools around to work with them. Good open source implementations exist.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#233Leave it to Salesforce to buy the clunky incumbent, not Periscope
Can you elaborate on the advantages of Periscope? I've used Tableau, but not Periscope. Browsing their site & marketing materials, it's not really clear to me how they're much different from Tableau.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
Tableau has a data etl tool called “Prep” that helps with this problem. But it only goes so far. But I think that’s where the problem truly requires a data engineer.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#235Leave it to Salesforce to buy the clunky incumbent, not Periscope
They are arguably essentially buying revenue to help their bottom line. Salesforce hopes to add $350-400M to their FY20 revenue
That's a pretty steep price to pay for a single-digit % increase in revenue. I view this more as filling a strategic hole. BI & Analytics from Salesforce are awful.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#236Earlier 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…
Good points, it's easy (well for me it was) to overlook gradual expansion beyond the CRM sphere.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
As I think about it, I don't see this as a play for business or much of direct competition at all, they simply both had strategic gaps, but for very different reasons, in their BI/Analytics offerings.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#238Oh 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 competi…
Yeah as the defacto Tableau Server administrator in my org, I am not happy with Tableau. Despite it's power and ability to let less-technical people generate insights from data, the administration experience as a whole is a total nightmare; purchasing/applying licensing to all installations is a disaster. Maintenance upgrades and backup procedures are also sort of wonky. For the data visualization piece, I personally feel like the software is difficult to use because it uses custom "branded" terminology for many things, so the knowledge you gain using Tableau can't often help you outside of Tableau... and then they place many features in locations that are not intuitive and thus difficult to find without documentation or prior experience.
We're a Microsoft-heavy shop, and I've been trying to get them to move to Power Bi simply because it's far more fully featured, easier to use if you're familiar with the "Windows way" of working, and has streamlined administration/installation/licensing/configuration in Windows environments.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#239One 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…
> that's a massive waste of your time and effort.
Yeah I work at a company in the analytics space and see that all the time. It peaks the curiosity of people who are software developers (yet their core competency at their job is something else). They think its a fun work side-project and go after it. Write some python scripts to do ETL and process the data...make a backend with pg, a web server, then do charts in d3.js.
A year later they have a bunch of nice demos to their bosses but nothing that they can actually use in production because it crashes, there's no UI for interactive queries, no reports for people in the business groups, no user management etc. Then they drop it because they're busy with their actual job. So the cost of that engineers time to do something that didn't work was about $20-30k over a year. While the product they could actually use in production was around the same price.
Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
#240So 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…
When I look at Jupyter notebooks, I ask myself why is anyone bother with ootb reporting tools or growing their own? Jupyter notebooks are the right mix of customizable and self-documenting.