Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B • Hacker News Board

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#61

Post by dmor » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

victor106 wrote: post #58

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…

Exactly what we’ve been looking for. An open source ETL tool. This looks great. Will check it out for sure. Keep up the great work. I wonder if there are any other open source tools in this space?

There are some great tools in this space, definitely worth exploring.

Our vision is to glue the steps from ETL to dashboard together in an end-to-end solution. We pick whatever we consider best in class and integrate it. So far, we've got Singer, DBT, Jupyter Notebooks and Apache Airflow and we're using VueJS for both the product UI and our website.

We're also working on a blog post exploration what other acquisition might happen in this space. We're adding suggestions to the spreadsheet as we hear them on Twitter, HN, etc https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/first-looker-and-tableau...

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#62

Post by Gpetrium » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #26

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,…

It’s a risky play. At my enterprise company, we’re not allowed to use a single vendor for everything, we explicitly must use different companies if a favoured vendor hits a certain spend threshold. This is to prevent cost overruns and solution capture, where every solution to your company’s problems becomes “give it to X vendor” and then X vendor kills a product line and you’re toast. Salesforce needs to be careful o…

Although there is a good % of the market that works in a similar way to your business, it is worth noting that when a deal is exceptionally good, executives will create exceptions. MS Suite and some of its satellite offerings (PowerBI,Sharepoint,etc) is a good example of an exception.

There are also cases where a company will pick multiple vendors in an attempt to de-risk and/or for negotiating tactics. If you are fully dependent on a single vendor, the cost of migrating tends to skyrocket and the negotiating power moves towards the vendor.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#63

Post by marcinzm » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #45

collyw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business users don't usually have a clue what a join is.

No, but most of them know what a v-lookup is, and almost all of them know when they need the result that a join accomplishes.

Yeah, one of my old coworkers was ecstatic when he learned about joins. He'd been downloading two tables and then using vlookup to join them in Excel. Using actual joins sped up his workflow a lot.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#64

Post by Gpetrium » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

If we look at Gartner's Analytics & BI magic quadrant from Feb 2019 (https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B02387...) it becomes clear that Tableau(Salesforce) & PowerBI(Microsoft) are the driving force in the area.

The move to buy Tableau likely comes from an interest in enhancing cross-compatibility between Salesforce+Tableau, the ability to provide a more robust service offering that can compete with Microsoft (e.g. If you buy our CRM solution, we will give you Tableau for a 25% discount) and a concern that another big player would have come in and taken Tableau.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#65

Post by cujic9 » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

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.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#66

Post by anonu » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

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…

> Their ticker is cool and maybe sales force wants to be DATA on nasdaq.

CRM is a pretty darn good ticker for Salesforce. Why would you change it? It perfectly explains your core business

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#67

Post by brightball » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

I'm still really interested to see if there's any long term blow back for Salesforce from the whole Camping World saga.

Even for people who agree on principle, as a business owner in general I'd be very wary of using software from any 3rd party who's willing to try to influence how I run my own business. It makes me wonder about all of the other companies under that SF umbrella too.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#68

Post by kerng » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

Wow, this seems extremely overpriced! Should give Microsoft and PowerBI a big boost value wise.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#69

Post by woodgrainz » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

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.

Indeed, it's cyclical. About 7 years ago there was a social media platform buying spree. Salesforce bought Radian6 and Buddy Media (for ~$700M). Oracle bought Virtue for $300M. Google made its own acquisitions in the space (Wildfire).

But now, Salesforce now has a bigger war chest to play with.

Looks like BI is the new hotness.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#70

Post by sixdimensional » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

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 scary proposition to me.

Fair enough if you are running your infrastructure on open standard tech and common cloud platforms, but not locked away in Salesforce.

This is reminding me of the behavior of other large orgs, like Oracle.