31 ms·

Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

950 points by albertwang 7y ago

alvern 7y ago
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.
- nirav72 7y ago
  yeah I see Alteryx or something similar as their next purchase. All they are missing now is a ETL solution.
  - 8EC301AA 7y ago
    What do you call Mulesoft?
    - oicu812 7y ago
      The #6 tool behind Informatica, Dell Boomi, Jitterbit, Workato and SnapLogic according to Gartner.
      - 8EC301AA 7y ago
        Yet it's still an ETL tool. On a sidenote, at what point do we stop taking Gartner seriously? Recent report had MicroStrategy (complete dinosaur of an application) ranked top on almost every category. It's so blatant. https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6P7GS86&ct=190517&st=sb https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6P7GS86&ct=190517&...
ackbar03 7y ago
I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it?
- rotten 7y ago
  It is what Excel should have evolved into. I still think Microsoft should have bought them and merged it into Excel.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    Didn't Microsoft acquire the Vertipaq/xVelocity engine and then go to use that in Excel (Power Pivot), SSAS Tabular Models and Power BI?
    - BrentOzar 7y ago
      Yes, but that's just the back end. Not to minimize it, but that's nowhere near as appealing to business users as the front end is.
  - gerhardi 7y ago
    Microsoft has PowerBI which is already almost magic for many business users with it's ease of connectability with different databases and SaaS services. Transformations, parsing, mixing data from different sources and reporting capabilities are also easy to start with and quite powerful in the right hands. It's not integrated into Excel directly but sits quite well imho in the MS ecosystem.
    - jefe_ 7y ago
      Power BI also has a free version that is quite capable. I find the charts easier to work with than Excel.
      - mastry 7y ago
        It's good but the free version doesn't let you share your results.
te_chris 7y ago
Leave it to Salesforce to buy the clunky incumbent, not Periscope
- laurentb 7y ago
  Periscope has merged with Sisense: https://www.periscopedata.com/blog/periscope-data-sisense-better-together https://www.periscopedata.com/blog/periscope-data-sisense-be...
- olivermarks 7y ago
  They are arguably essentially buying revenue to help their bottom line. Salesforce hopes to add $350-400M to their FY20 revenue
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    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.
  - test1235 7y ago
    I don't know much about company account structures and finance dynamics, but that doesn't sound like much compared to the $15.7bn price?
- malux85 7y ago
  Thats because market penetration and revenue matters more than a few CSS animations
  - debacle 7y ago
    And enterprise sales.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  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.
diminish 7y ago
Bright years ahead for acquisitions in business & development tools segment: Slack, Gitlab, Figma
dgudkov 7y ago
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.
- bardam 7y ago
  Qlik was sold to Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, about two years ago for $3B. Not sure if that's a relative bargain compared to this deal or if it makes the $15.7B look totally unrealistic. As of a few years ago the total revenue of the two firms wasn't that different.
  - dgudkov 7y ago
    I've heard that Thoma Bravo specializes on re-selling assets. If that's true then the $15bln sticker on Tableau should only justify and boost their intention to re-sell Qlik.
    - chrisjc 7y ago
      Haven't heard much about Qlik lately. A few years ago we were evaluating Birst and Qlik, and have since settled on Looker and Tableau. Birst end up getting acquired too. https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to-acquire-birst-infor https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to-acquire-birst-infor
    - mbesto 7y ago
      > I've heard that Thoma Bravo specializes on re-selling assets. This is true, because Thoma is a PE firm and is literally in the business of acquiring and selling companies.
- woodgrainz 7y ago
  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.
exabrial 7y ago
Can't wait to pay $1000 per gigabyte per month to host my analytics data there.
- thrav 7y ago
  I don’t think this data is going into the Oracle tables
- ineedasername 7y ago
  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.
  - martin__ 7y ago
    The data storage limit increased quite a bit just a few months ago: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring19/release-notes/rn_storage.htm https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring19/rele...
- creativityland 7y ago
  Not far from the truth here.
albertwang 7y ago
Salesforce Press release: https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2019/06/191006-f/ https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases...
cl42 7y ago
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, the marketing team another... If Salesforce thinks they can run the entire underlying data infrastructure in addition to the actual customer-facing functions, then this is a smart play.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  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 or else they’ll hit that threshold where companies don’t want to use them because you as a client are too small. Google is facing this problem right now.
  - cl42 7y ago
    Interesting! I haven't seen that requirement before, but it does make sense.
    - wil421 7y ago
      I’ve seen requirements by Target and Walmart to not use any AWS infrastructure in the service you are providing them.
      - cl42 7y ago
        I've seen that with retailers too-- but this is often driven by a fear/hate of Amazon rather than any real IT policy.
prepend 7y ago
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 running the visualization. The catch is that creating serverless dynamic visualizations isn’t all that money-making and the cool UI/UX design tool is outside of OSS’ wheelhouse.
- woodgrainz 7y ago
  Very expensive acquisition. Perhaps in 5 years we'll look back at this move as a prime example of the bubble we're currently in.
  - okr 7y ago
    Or maybe the begin of an even bigger wealth creation period. "And why did i not invest earlier?"
    - moate 7y ago
      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).
      - woodgrainz 7y ago
        NP complete?
- texodus 7y ago
  You may want to take a look at [perspective](https://perspective.finos.org/ https://perspective.finos.org/), a WASM-based serverless dynamic visualization library with [D3FC](https://d3fc.io https://d3fc.io) charting.
dmor 7y ago
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 open source alternative at Meltano (www.meltano.com) Edit: just wrote a quick post with some open questions I'd like to explore around this deal https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-tableau-for-15-7b/ https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-...
- steve19 7y ago
  What's the business model?
  - dmor 7y ago
    Have not decided yet, but I’m leaning toward consulting services and possibly even marketplace. There are so many more independent analysts, data engineers, and other experts/specialists who could provide a service network beyond anything we could hire internally. It’s still very TBD while we get the product to a place where those opportunities start be more emergent. We definitely expect it to be an open core model though, similar to GitLab. By remaining self-hosted we avoid the big expense (and risk) of storing users data, and they can pick whatever cloud they want. Our team is 5 core members working at GitLab, and we have about a dozen contributors. So it’s kind of a startup within a late stage “startup” (unicorn).
- jdreaver 7y ago
  I just wanted to pop in and say Meltano looks awesome! Good luck with it.
- victor106 7y ago
  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?
code4tee 7y ago
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 it’s peak. That said, we’ll done to the Tableau team for having gone public and then selling the company again at a nice bump.
- aceregen 7y ago
  Hi, like to learn more about some of the data issues you see most companies have that Tableau can't address (outside of glorified Excel)?
- ineedasername 7y ago
  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.
themark 7y ago
Great news! Maybe the Salesforce connector will finally work properly and allow filtering.
themark 7y ago
Not very surprising, they have been looking at them for a while. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-document-listed-tableau-among-salesforces-potential-acquisition-targets/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-docu...
lmeyerov 7y ago
Wow. When we started Graphistry, our view was, "skate to where the puck is going", so while we saw Looker and Periscope burning sales/marketing/dev $$$, the result felt 95% similar to Tabluea Public. Instead, we've focused on figuring out how to harness next gen -- GPUs, how to expose ML and automation, etc. While I still think we are right long-term, and that the cloud co's will be paying top dollar here for the next 5 years.. Short-term, I didn't expect this much market hunger for old-school. Bravo to all the product PMs!
- lmeyerov 7y ago
  To clarify -- not just us, but think ServiceNow, Thoughtspot, and our fellow GPU startups. The next 5 years will be fun!
Gpetrium 7y ago
If we look at Gartner's Analytics & BI magic quadrant from Feb 2019 (https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B0238781B1.ashx 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.
- danielscrubs 7y ago
  I’ve used PowerBI but it feels extremely limiting if you have a coder background. Don’t know a single person who likes the BI tools that exists today and I’ve worked with a lot of BI people. I’m convinced BI people becomes coders solely because of the bad tools that exists today. Intelligent autocompletion, git and strong types? No! But here, have some drag and drop!
  - hello_moto 7y ago
    PowerBI is not for developer. It's for Data Scientist/Business Analyst. Someone will come and build the dataset (or known as model) and the BA/DS can start building visualization that make sense to tell story about the company (or to tell the story about something). It's a whole different market/profession.
    - danielscrubs 7y ago
      Reproducibility is the number one rule in (data) science...
  - michaelmarkell 7y ago
    PowerBI is working hard to accommodate developers - for instance, we now have the ability to create custom python visualizations (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/python-visualizations-in-power-bi-service/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/python-visualizatio...) Disclaimer: I work for PowerBI
cujic9 7y ago
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.
- reilly3000 7y ago
  I held Salesforce stock from 2016-18 and it helped us just buy our first home. They have incredible lock-in with a very large and diverse customer base. They now have to defend themselves against Google's purchase of Looker, and the rise of PowerBI.
  - freewilly1040 7y ago
    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.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      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 data engineering to fill that gap. Tableau will fix that, but I'm staggered at the price.
      - reilly3000 7y ago
        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.
brightball 7y ago
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.
kerng 7y ago
Wow, this seems extremely overpriced! Should give Microsoft and PowerBI a big boost value wise.
iamgopal 7y ago
Just for the comparison, salesforce's revenue is ~$13B. At current profit rate, ( including that of tableau ), they can generate $15B in about 30 year, may be 20 year given growth and inflation. I run a small business, I don't think I would be able to generate equivalent of deal, nor my banker/investor allowed such a investment, no matter what growth would look like. Ultimately my take is, small business usually take growth from someone else most of the time ( i.e. new restaurant steal customer from another old customer ), instead of generating brand new growth, while bigger business are actually creating - or - consolidating whole industry for growth in a society-positive way in the long run. ( like uber ). Still somewhere I would wish I can replicate such method of growth for small businesses.
- atourgates 7y ago
  Wow. I think that’s a very insightful perspective, but come away with a very different perspective: Big companies play by very different rules than small ones, especially big tech companies right now, and I don’t see consolidation being (broadly) socially positive at all really.
- thehappypm 7y ago
  This deal is structured with no cash exchanging hands, it's a stock-only deal. Tableau stock becomes fresh Salesforce stock.
teilo 7y ago
I can hope they leave them alone, but that's a fools wish. Not looking forward to them stripping away feature after feature, and charging exorbitant per-user prices to get them back.
hangonhn 7y ago
Anyone know how something like Tableau compares to something like Palantir? I don't have any experience with either but I've heard that Palantir is valued quite high as well.
ishikawa 7y ago
Did Google know Tableau could also be acquired? I wonder how powerful this acquisition would be for Google Cloud instead of Looker.
- lelima 7y ago
  ~15B vs ~2B I think they evaluated very well
ben_jones 7y ago
I'm responsible for external salesforce integrations at my company, this is a really critical acquisition. Salesforce feature categories are surprisingly easy to compete with (be it LeadSourcing, Pipeline Management, 3rd Party App distribution, Licensing, Performance, Design, etc.) because they do a relatively average job at each of them. There are dozens of competitors springing up, many of whom target one of these categories as a key selling point. Now if you go into a fortune 500 sales meeting to pitch how much better the analytics stack of your CRM is, they will come back saying that Salesforce is clearly investing to be superior in that category for the long haul.
- Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
  Honestly, while doing some business analyst job for a company, the higher up keep on bringing Salesforce as something we should consider for a B2C project. Their marketing force is something to recon - and the lack of basic knowledge about what they wanted to put on the market was frightening. So, they’re not the best? People don’t seem to think clearly about this :(
  - basch 7y ago
    Sometimes its easier to buy the second best at everything, (caught Microsoft) and benefit from everything supposedly working together, and a clear cohesive overall roadmap, than trying to stitch 200 individual products together, make them all pass data to each other naively, and hope that their feature changes and roadmaps stay aligned.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      Oh yes ^^^ this. Where I work we recently upgraded from a single legacy product to another ERP, only for many secondary functions we went "best of breed" to additional SaaS products. It has had, literally, an exponential increase in the necessary resources to make them all work together. Keep in mind, the ERP we upgraded to also had modules for these secondary functions, but it was a case of Perfect-Is-The-Enemy-of-Good, and the sum of all parts is now much less than the mediocre Good we would have had with a single ecosystem.
chasd00 7y ago
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 couple years ago. Under the covers it's awesome (great integration of multiple open source technologies) and the "IOT Cloud" UI isn't bad either but they didn't have an answer for data visualization on the scale they built for. on a tangent, while getting into SF's IOT product they were talking about how it was so easy business analyst could set it up (famous last words right?). It's pretty easy to make a mistake and create a billion SF cases ( case is like a trouble-ticket in SF's Service product) in the span of "click -> "oops let me undo that" -> click" hah
- xauronx 7y ago
  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.
- raphtheb 7y ago
  Hey! Glad you enjoyed what the IOT team was doing! I didn't think many people knew about us! I was actually a part of that team and left Salesforce pretty recently. I think i can safely state that everyone involved in building the tech for that IOT product was pretty proud of what we built. That being said, the team that built it 2-3 years back and the current team are fundamentally different. The department was thoroughly axed back around November 2017, and multiple teams, including my old one, were spun out into different other projects. It's a shame really, that project was what lured me into joining a behemoth like Salesforce in the first place.
  - chasd00 7y ago
    Wow we probably crossed paths. At the time, a CTA buddy of mine was starting the North America IOT Cloud practice at Accenture and was bringing me along for the ride. He had a baby and eventually left to run a program at a client (9 to 5 no travel). Without him, I bailed soon after for a higher up role at a startup. I would still love to get back in that scene though, this acquisition makes it that much more interesting.
bondolo 7y ago
Another reminder that Oracle got a screaming deal for Sun at a net $5.6 billion in 2009. Either that or Salesforce has more money than brains.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  It's a stock deal, and Salesforce seems a bit stretched in valuation, so I'm sure the deal isn't going to end up being this high.
luizb 7y ago
Dear techcrunch: I will NOT disable my adblock
kfk 7y ago
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. Python is today the only "glue code" that puts all of it together, from data to insights.
- jjtheblunt 7y ago
  What is Vega?
  - tarp 7y ago
    > The goal of the Vega project is to promote an ecosystem of usable and interoperable tools, supporting use cases ranging from exploratory data analysis to effective communication via custom visualization design.[0] 0: https://vega.github.io/vega/about/ https://vega.github.io/vega/about/
- remus 7y ago
  > 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.
  - kfk 7y ago
    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 in their ways that you'd be waiting years for each analysis + you'd spend 10x what you should.
btbuildem 7y ago
I really really hope this makes Salesforce more like Tableau and not the other way around. Their UX and workflows are atrocious (not that their main competitors' aren't).
TadaScientist 7y ago
I believe I ought to mention R studio as an alternative. What Tableau does, R libraries can do better. https://www.showmeshiny.com/ https://www.showmeshiny.com/ https://gallery.htmlwidgets.org/ https://gallery.htmlwidgets.org/ https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/ https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/ with shiny / D3 and general JS support. ps; i am not affiliated with any of these sites or libraries.
anonu 7y ago
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 the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that "just work".
- fjsolwmv 7y ago
  Are you sure your scripts and web server costs less than Tableau?
  - infinite8s 7y ago
    Probably not. From his comment I doubt he's even used Tableau (and I say this as a programmer who worked on something similar - https://perspective.finos.org https://perspective.finos.org - and yet I still find myself turning to tableau pretty often).
  - himlion 7y ago
    Yeah, Tableau is very expensive. Way more than a few weeks of dev time.
    - finaliteration 7y ago
      > 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 on other things.
      - himlion 7y ago
        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
sireat 7y ago
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. https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual There was a free option that was pitifuly unused and crippled to cloud only without any exports. Then again by focusing only on companies for whom the licensing costs are a drop in a cloudy ocean Tableau brought in a 16B valuation.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  >I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students. Weren't you using offer of free licenses for teaching environments? Those are full versions, albeit they do not include Server, but that's not really necessary to learn how to make solid BI dashboards.
- philshem 7y ago
  PowerBI has no Mac client.
- turtlebits 7y ago
  Tableau is free for students and teachers. (1 year license) https://www.tableau.com/academic/students https://www.tableau.com/academic/students. It's not crippled.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    I used to teach Tableau too and while you're right, the tool still becomes useless after graduation because of the ~$1000/yr price tag. From there, tableau becomes a "learn it just to get hired at a company that might use it" tactic, which is a valid job hunting strategy but is not something useful to learn in a data viz class, especially since there are other data viz tools the students can learn and keep using after graduation.
rmk2 7y ago
Oh 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 competitors, but many of the server-side parts are various levels of disastrous (as is their support), and their "data preparation" tool needs some serious improvements to be borderline useable. 15+ billion seems like a lot to me given how Tableau interacts with customers and partners alike, especially seeing how they are activelly alienating existing enterprise customers, all in favour of new sales, but perhaps something will change for the better here.
- soverance 7y ago
  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.
  - rmk2 7y ago
    I think Tableau Server works better on Linux, where upgrades etc. are also somewhat less painful and require less downtime. That said, it baffles me why I have to restart Tableau Server 3 or 4 times during installation, and why I have to restart it for trivial changes more generally. For a piece of software that specifically ships with a cluster controller and full-blown zookeeper, somehow their engineers (or "engineers", as I sometimes get the impression) manage to make things that should be trivially solvable with reloads, partial restarts or spawning new workers (e.g. SSL certificates for the built-in Apache webserver) require a complete restart of the whole node. edit: Regarding Power BI -- I feel that Tableau Server is (for better or worse) one of the killer features for many enterprise customers, because it means all of your data can remain within your own infrastructure and does not have to rely on external cloud providers. If that is not a requirement in your organisation, Power BI might make sense depending on your overall IT landscape, as well as your users' specific needs. On the other hand, if your organisation requires hosting things yourself, I guess it doesn't matter how miserable the experience is for you as an administrator. That's basically Tableau Server in a nutshell.
cudjocaverns 7y ago
With Salesforce banning certain firearms companies from using its services - how will this affect Tableau users who don't fit their new ban on these companies?
ruoyucad 7y ago
So what does this mean to Tableau using BI analysts out there? does it add values to my tableau certifications?
aheilbut 7y ago
At its core, Tableau is an implementation of a really elegant formalism to specify visualizations, and it's much more organized and declarative than something like Grammar of Graphics. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/
mateo411 7y ago
Looker, Periscope, and Tableau have all been acquired or merged in the last six weeks. Periscope merged with another BI start up Sisense. Looker and Tableau were part of a multibillion dollar acquisitions. It's an interesting time for this space.
SanchoPanda 7y ago
I'm shocked to see this not being a better day for Elastic. While still quite narrow with ELK stack, the elasticsearch backend is something that many more companies can make useful quickly given how non-finicky it is.
bhouston 7y ago
I was recruited for one of the first engineering positions at Tableau a very long time ago, but I turned it down as it just wasn't interesting enough. I think I was targetted in part because I was a SIGGRAPH presenter/author as one of the co-founders, Pat Hanrahan, was big into SIGGRAPH. Oh well. It is a great success for a brilliant computer graphics professor: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/ http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/
williesleg 7y ago
Yay! And the fucking needful is being done
nigealj 7y ago
They paid for a bubble (Tableau stock) using another bubble (CRM stock). So all is good in the funny world that we live in.
crispyambulance 7y ago
I think that many folks don't remember or know about how the word "BI" [business intelligence] was born. Back in the day corporations paid programmers and consulting companies millions of dollars for the purpose of building out applications with databases upon which to digitize their business processes. This was a great for a couple decades, up until some time in the 90's. It was at that point that expectations had caught up with digitization and having your battle-axes in accounting/order-entry/supply-chain do their keyboard magic on green-screens just wasn't cutting it. To actually understand what was going on, managers had to ask for specific reports from these people and they were just not in a position to do the reports as well has get their own ever-increasing-shit done. Let alone whatever the hell sales was doing. For a control-freak in management this just isn't acceptable. They started to find ways to "serve themselves". Eventually someone had the idea to hook the enterprise databases into their own zany spreadsheets. It was amazing. There was such a fountain of knowledge and insight that it made the people who could do that seem like relative geniuses. Almost "intelligent" in their business jobs. Thus, "Business Intelligence" was born. "Business Intelligence" is the practice of making badly-designed opaque shit from brutal, inscrutable business applications... visible. Only now are makers of enterprise applications starting to get it (or pretend to get it).
jonloyens 7y ago
I'm the CPO at a SaaS data catalog and analysis hub company called data.world - I was at the Snowflake Summit when the Looker acquisition by Google was announced - the guys at their booth seemed pretty happy ;) With Google snapping up Looker ($2.6B) for Google Cloud, Salesforce's much bigger purchase of Tableau is a clear sign that the big guys see buying BI tools is a good way to expand the reach of their offerings into more of the business. We talk to companies every day that have made massive investments in data warehouses, viz tools, and high-paid data scientists, but they still aren't agile enough because they can't tie it all together so their people can find and use the right data when they need it. I read an article once about the failure of self serve BI and the reality is that you just end up creating more sprawl. People need tools to reduce the clutter and sprawl and stop the endless chain of emails trying to figure out what table to look at or query to use or if your source is still updating. We built our data catalog and analysis hub for exactly this, and it's extremely validating to see the big guys like Salesforce and Google investing in expanding the user base of big data tools and I really hope we can be part of the solution of sorting it all out!
- samstave 7y ago
  Looker is way better than tableau. Lets break it down: Both are over priced Lookeer, however has LookerML Tableau obfuscates all code. Looker has easier bolt-ons to redshift/postgres Tableau's BI tool-set is weaker than looker, albeit, wider spread (more mature) So, I think google got a steal and SF is playing catch-up... at a high cost. Plus SF's sunk costs in eveything is going to make a 15B buy take at least two decades to pay off....
  - CGamesPlay 7y ago
    I disagree with you! Looker is more advanced, and that does not mean it is better. Tableau’s tools were MUCH easier for me to make ad hoc analyses with, as well as to create dashboard with. Yes, there were some transformations that I couldn’t apply and had to go to custom SQL or ETL for, but the total time to finish my analyses and produce high-quality live dashboards was much less than with Looker. (I don’t know why you are being downvoted though, you’re entitled to an opinion same as me)
redstone08 7y ago
I think the value will be created from the data itself, less focus on data-processing skills. Of course, modeling skills will be still important at future, but data-processing would rather become much more easier. That's why self-bi tools like Tableau, Elastic search are becoming more and more popular. I am personally focusing on Metatron Discovery, which is an Open-Sourced Big data analytics platform for citizen scientists. Link : https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery
1290cc 7y ago
Very happy for the Tableau folks, they are great to work with! My firm uses Informatica's IICS to output all of the datasets for Tableau to visualize, its not as exciting as the hundreds of frameworks and languages that do the same but it works reliably and I don't have to hire expensive data scientists to get the job done or switch tech every few years to whatever is the flavor of the month. We take the 80/20 approach that most questions the business asks can be answered with Informatica. The last 20% we save for our developers and the odd data scientist to help us with.

950 points by albertwang 7y ago

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.

nirav72 7y ago
yeah I see Alteryx or something similar as their next purchase. All they are missing now is a ETL solution.
- 8EC301AA 7y ago
  What do you call Mulesoft?
  - oicu812 7y ago
    The #6 tool behind Informatica, Dell Boomi, Jitterbit, Workato and SnapLogic according to Gartner.
    - 8EC301AA 7y ago
      Yet it's still an ETL tool. On a sidenote, at what point do we stop taking Gartner seriously? Recent report had MicroStrategy (complete dinosaur of an application) ranked top on almost every category. It's so blatant. https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6P7GS86&ct=190517&st=sb https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6P7GS86&ct=190517&...

ackbar03 7y ago

I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it?

rotten 7y ago
It is what Excel should have evolved into. I still think Microsoft should have bought them and merged it into Excel.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Didn't Microsoft acquire the Vertipaq/xVelocity engine and then go to use that in Excel (Power Pivot), SSAS Tabular Models and Power BI?
  - BrentOzar 7y ago
    Yes, but that's just the back end. Not to minimize it, but that's nowhere near as appealing to business users as the front end is.
- gerhardi 7y ago
  Microsoft has PowerBI which is already almost magic for many business users with it's ease of connectability with different databases and SaaS services. Transformations, parsing, mixing data from different sources and reporting capabilities are also easy to start with and quite powerful in the right hands. It's not integrated into Excel directly but sits quite well imho in the MS ecosystem.
  - jefe_ 7y ago
    Power BI also has a free version that is quite capable. I find the charts easier to work with than Excel.
    - mastry 7y ago
      It's good but the free version doesn't let you share your results.

te_chris 7y ago

Leave it to Salesforce to buy the clunky incumbent, not Periscope

laurentb 7y ago
Periscope has merged with Sisense: https://www.periscopedata.com/blog/periscope-data-sisense-better-together https://www.periscopedata.com/blog/periscope-data-sisense-be...
olivermarks 7y ago
They are arguably essentially buying revenue to help their bottom line. Salesforce hopes to add $350-400M to their FY20 revenue
- ineedasername 7y ago
  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.
- test1235 7y ago
  I don't know much about company account structures and finance dynamics, but that doesn't sound like much compared to the $15.7bn price?
malux85 7y ago
Thats because market penetration and revenue matters more than a few CSS animations
- debacle 7y ago
  And enterprise sales.
ineedasername 7y ago
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.

diminish 7y ago

Bright years ahead for acquisitions in business & development tools segment: Slack, Gitlab, Figma

dgudkov 7y ago

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.

bardam 7y ago
Qlik was sold to Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, about two years ago for $3B. Not sure if that's a relative bargain compared to this deal or if it makes the $15.7B look totally unrealistic. As of a few years ago the total revenue of the two firms wasn't that different.
- dgudkov 7y ago
  I've heard that Thoma Bravo specializes on re-selling assets. If that's true then the $15bln sticker on Tableau should only justify and boost their intention to re-sell Qlik.
  - chrisjc 7y ago
    Haven't heard much about Qlik lately. A few years ago we were evaluating Birst and Qlik, and have since settled on Looker and Tableau. Birst end up getting acquired too. https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to-acquire-birst-infor https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to-acquire-birst-infor
  - mbesto 7y ago
    > I've heard that Thoma Bravo specializes on re-selling assets. This is true, because Thoma is a PE firm and is literally in the business of acquiring and selling companies.
woodgrainz 7y ago
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.

exabrial 7y ago

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

thrav 7y ago
I don’t think this data is going into the Oracle tables
ineedasername 7y ago
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.
- martin__ 7y ago
  The data storage limit increased quite a bit just a few months ago: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring19/release-notes/rn_storage.htm https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring19/rele...
creativityland 7y ago
Not far from the truth here.

albertwang 7y ago

Salesforce Press release: https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2019/06/191006-f/ https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases...

cl42 7y ago

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, the marketing team another... If Salesforce thinks they can run the entire underlying data infrastructure in addition to the actual customer-facing functions, then this is a smart play.

jbob2000 7y ago
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 or else they’ll hit that threshold where companies don’t want to use them because you as a client are too small. Google is facing this problem right now.
- cl42 7y ago
  Interesting! I haven't seen that requirement before, but it does make sense.
  - wil421 7y ago
    I’ve seen requirements by Target and Walmart to not use any AWS infrastructure in the service you are providing them.
    - cl42 7y ago
      I've seen that with retailers too-- but this is often driven by a fear/hate of Amazon rather than any real IT policy.

prepend 7y ago

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 running the visualization. The catch is that creating serverless dynamic visualizations isn’t all that money-making and the cool UI/UX design tool is outside of OSS’ wheelhouse.

woodgrainz 7y ago
Very expensive acquisition. Perhaps in 5 years we'll look back at this move as a prime example of the bubble we're currently in.
- okr 7y ago
  Or maybe the begin of an even bigger wealth creation period. "And why did i not invest earlier?"
  - moate 7y ago
    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).
    - woodgrainz 7y ago
      NP complete?
texodus 7y ago
You may want to take a look at [perspective](https://perspective.finos.org/ https://perspective.finos.org/), a WASM-based serverless dynamic visualization library with [D3FC](https://d3fc.io https://d3fc.io) charting.

dmor 7y ago

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 open source alternative at Meltano (www.meltano.com) Edit: just wrote a quick post with some open questions I'd like to explore around this deal https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-tableau-for-15-7b/ https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-...

steve19 7y ago
What's the business model?
- dmor 7y ago
  Have not decided yet, but I’m leaning toward consulting services and possibly even marketplace. There are so many more independent analysts, data engineers, and other experts/specialists who could provide a service network beyond anything we could hire internally. It’s still very TBD while we get the product to a place where those opportunities start be more emergent. We definitely expect it to be an open core model though, similar to GitLab. By remaining self-hosted we avoid the big expense (and risk) of storing users data, and they can pick whatever cloud they want. Our team is 5 core members working at GitLab, and we have about a dozen contributors. So it’s kind of a startup within a late stage “startup” (unicorn).
jdreaver 7y ago
I just wanted to pop in and say Meltano looks awesome! Good luck with it.
victor106 7y ago
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?

code4tee 7y ago

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 it’s peak. That said, we’ll done to the Tableau team for having gone public and then selling the company again at a nice bump.

aceregen 7y ago
Hi, like to learn more about some of the data issues you see most companies have that Tableau can't address (outside of glorified Excel)?
ineedasername 7y ago
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.

themark 7y ago

Great news! Maybe the Salesforce connector will finally work properly and allow filtering.

themark 7y ago

Not very surprising, they have been looking at them for a while. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-document-listed-tableau-among-salesforces-potential-acquisition-targets/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-docu...

lmeyerov 7y ago

Wow. When we started Graphistry, our view was, "skate to where the puck is going", so while we saw Looker and Periscope burning sales/marketing/dev $$$, the result felt 95% similar to Tabluea Public. Instead, we've focused on figuring out how to harness next gen -- GPUs, how to expose ML and automation, etc. While I still think we are right long-term, and that the cloud co's will be paying top dollar here for the next 5 years.. Short-term, I didn't expect this much market hunger for old-school. Bravo to all the product PMs!

lmeyerov 7y ago
To clarify -- not just us, but think ServiceNow, Thoughtspot, and our fellow GPU startups. The next 5 years will be fun!

Gpetrium 7y ago

If we look at Gartner's Analytics & BI magic quadrant from Feb 2019 (https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B0238781B1.ashx 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.

danielscrubs 7y ago
I’ve used PowerBI but it feels extremely limiting if you have a coder background. Don’t know a single person who likes the BI tools that exists today and I’ve worked with a lot of BI people. I’m convinced BI people becomes coders solely because of the bad tools that exists today. Intelligent autocompletion, git and strong types? No! But here, have some drag and drop!
- hello_moto 7y ago
  PowerBI is not for developer. It's for Data Scientist/Business Analyst. Someone will come and build the dataset (or known as model) and the BA/DS can start building visualization that make sense to tell story about the company (or to tell the story about something). It's a whole different market/profession.
  - danielscrubs 7y ago
    Reproducibility is the number one rule in (data) science...
- michaelmarkell 7y ago
  PowerBI is working hard to accommodate developers - for instance, we now have the ability to create custom python visualizations (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/python-visualizations-in-power-bi-service/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/python-visualizatio...) Disclaimer: I work for PowerBI

cujic9 7y ago

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.

reilly3000 7y ago
I held Salesforce stock from 2016-18 and it helped us just buy our first home. They have incredible lock-in with a very large and diverse customer base. They now have to defend themselves against Google's purchase of Looker, and the rise of PowerBI.
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  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.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    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 data engineering to fill that gap. Tableau will fix that, but I'm staggered at the price.
    - reilly3000 7y ago
      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.

brightball 7y ago

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.

kerng 7y ago

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

iamgopal 7y ago

Just for the comparison, salesforce's revenue is ~$13B. At current profit rate, ( including that of tableau ), they can generate $15B in about 30 year, may be 20 year given growth and inflation. I run a small business, I don't think I would be able to generate equivalent of deal, nor my banker/investor allowed such a investment, no matter what growth would look like. Ultimately my take is, small business usually take growth from someone else most of the time ( i.e. new restaurant steal customer from another old customer ), instead of generating brand new growth, while bigger business are actually creating - or - consolidating whole industry for growth in a society-positive way in the long run. ( like uber ). Still somewhere I would wish I can replicate such method of growth for small businesses.

atourgates 7y ago
Wow. I think that’s a very insightful perspective, but come away with a very different perspective: Big companies play by very different rules than small ones, especially big tech companies right now, and I don’t see consolidation being (broadly) socially positive at all really.
thehappypm 7y ago
This deal is structured with no cash exchanging hands, it's a stock-only deal. Tableau stock becomes fresh Salesforce stock.

teilo 7y ago

I can hope they leave them alone, but that's a fools wish. Not looking forward to them stripping away feature after feature, and charging exorbitant per-user prices to get them back.

hangonhn 7y ago

Anyone know how something like Tableau compares to something like Palantir? I don't have any experience with either but I've heard that Palantir is valued quite high as well.

ishikawa 7y ago

Did Google know Tableau could also be acquired? I wonder how powerful this acquisition would be for Google Cloud instead of Looker.

lelima 7y ago
~15B vs ~2B I think they evaluated very well

ben_jones 7y ago

I'm responsible for external salesforce integrations at my company, this is a really critical acquisition. Salesforce feature categories are surprisingly easy to compete with (be it LeadSourcing, Pipeline Management, 3rd Party App distribution, Licensing, Performance, Design, etc.) because they do a relatively average job at each of them. There are dozens of competitors springing up, many of whom target one of these categories as a key selling point. Now if you go into a fortune 500 sales meeting to pitch how much better the analytics stack of your CRM is, they will come back saying that Salesforce is clearly investing to be superior in that category for the long haul.

Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
Honestly, while doing some business analyst job for a company, the higher up keep on bringing Salesforce as something we should consider for a B2C project. Their marketing force is something to recon - and the lack of basic knowledge about what they wanted to put on the market was frightening. So, they’re not the best? People don’t seem to think clearly about this :(
- basch 7y ago
  Sometimes its easier to buy the second best at everything, (caught Microsoft) and benefit from everything supposedly working together, and a clear cohesive overall roadmap, than trying to stitch 200 individual products together, make them all pass data to each other naively, and hope that their feature changes and roadmaps stay aligned.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Oh yes ^^^ this. Where I work we recently upgraded from a single legacy product to another ERP, only for many secondary functions we went "best of breed" to additional SaaS products. It has had, literally, an exponential increase in the necessary resources to make them all work together. Keep in mind, the ERP we upgraded to also had modules for these secondary functions, but it was a case of Perfect-Is-The-Enemy-of-Good, and the sum of all parts is now much less than the mediocre Good we would have had with a single ecosystem.

chasd00 7y ago

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 couple years ago. Under the covers it's awesome (great integration of multiple open source technologies) and the "IOT Cloud" UI isn't bad either but they didn't have an answer for data visualization on the scale they built for. on a tangent, while getting into SF's IOT product they were talking about how it was so easy business analyst could set it up (famous last words right?). It's pretty easy to make a mistake and create a billion SF cases ( case is like a trouble-ticket in SF's Service product) in the span of "click -> "oops let me undo that" -> click" hah

xauronx 7y ago
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.
raphtheb 7y ago
Hey! Glad you enjoyed what the IOT team was doing! I didn't think many people knew about us! I was actually a part of that team and left Salesforce pretty recently. I think i can safely state that everyone involved in building the tech for that IOT product was pretty proud of what we built. That being said, the team that built it 2-3 years back and the current team are fundamentally different. The department was thoroughly axed back around November 2017, and multiple teams, including my old one, were spun out into different other projects. It's a shame really, that project was what lured me into joining a behemoth like Salesforce in the first place.
- chasd00 7y ago
  Wow we probably crossed paths. At the time, a CTA buddy of mine was starting the North America IOT Cloud practice at Accenture and was bringing me along for the ride. He had a baby and eventually left to run a program at a client (9 to 5 no travel). Without him, I bailed soon after for a higher up role at a startup. I would still love to get back in that scene though, this acquisition makes it that much more interesting.

bondolo 7y ago

Another reminder that Oracle got a screaming deal for Sun at a net $5.6 billion in 2009. Either that or Salesforce has more money than brains.

partiallypro 7y ago
It's a stock deal, and Salesforce seems a bit stretched in valuation, so I'm sure the deal isn't going to end up being this high.

luizb 7y ago

Dear techcrunch: I will NOT disable my adblock

kfk 7y ago

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. Python is today the only "glue code" that puts all of it together, from data to insights.

jjtheblunt 7y ago
What is Vega?
- tarp 7y ago
  > The goal of the Vega project is to promote an ecosystem of usable and interoperable tools, supporting use cases ranging from exploratory data analysis to effective communication via custom visualization design.[0] 0: https://vega.github.io/vega/about/ https://vega.github.io/vega/about/
remus 7y ago
> 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.
- kfk 7y ago
  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 in their ways that you'd be waiting years for each analysis + you'd spend 10x what you should.

btbuildem 7y ago

I really really hope this makes Salesforce more like Tableau and not the other way around. Their UX and workflows are atrocious (not that their main competitors' aren't).

TadaScientist 7y ago

I believe I ought to mention R studio as an alternative. What Tableau does, R libraries can do better. https://www.showmeshiny.com/ https://www.showmeshiny.com/ https://gallery.htmlwidgets.org/ https://gallery.htmlwidgets.org/ https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/ https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/ with shiny / D3 and general JS support. ps; i am not affiliated with any of these sites or libraries.

anonu 7y ago

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 the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that "just work".

fjsolwmv 7y ago
Are you sure your scripts and web server costs less than Tableau?
- infinite8s 7y ago
  Probably not. From his comment I doubt he's even used Tableau (and I say this as a programmer who worked on something similar - https://perspective.finos.org https://perspective.finos.org - and yet I still find myself turning to tableau pretty often).
- himlion 7y ago
  Yeah, Tableau is very expensive. Way more than a few weeks of dev time.
  - finaliteration 7y ago
    > 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 on other things.
    - himlion 7y ago
      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

sireat 7y ago

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. https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual There was a free option that was pitifuly unused and crippled to cloud only without any exports. Then again by focusing only on companies for whom the licensing costs are a drop in a cloudy ocean Tableau brought in a 16B valuation.

ineedasername 7y ago
>I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students. Weren't you using offer of free licenses for teaching environments? Those are full versions, albeit they do not include Server, but that's not really necessary to learn how to make solid BI dashboards.
philshem 7y ago
PowerBI has no Mac client.
turtlebits 7y ago
Tableau is free for students and teachers. (1 year license) https://www.tableau.com/academic/students https://www.tableau.com/academic/students. It's not crippled.
- bduerst 7y ago
  I used to teach Tableau too and while you're right, the tool still becomes useless after graduation because of the ~$1000/yr price tag. From there, tableau becomes a "learn it just to get hired at a company that might use it" tactic, which is a valid job hunting strategy but is not something useful to learn in a data viz class, especially since there are other data viz tools the students can learn and keep using after graduation.

rmk2 7y ago

Oh 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 competitors, but many of the server-side parts are various levels of disastrous (as is their support), and their "data preparation" tool needs some serious improvements to be borderline useable. 15+ billion seems like a lot to me given how Tableau interacts with customers and partners alike, especially seeing how they are activelly alienating existing enterprise customers, all in favour of new sales, but perhaps something will change for the better here.

soverance 7y ago
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.
- rmk2 7y ago
  I think Tableau Server works better on Linux, where upgrades etc. are also somewhat less painful and require less downtime. That said, it baffles me why I have to restart Tableau Server 3 or 4 times during installation, and why I have to restart it for trivial changes more generally. For a piece of software that specifically ships with a cluster controller and full-blown zookeeper, somehow their engineers (or "engineers", as I sometimes get the impression) manage to make things that should be trivially solvable with reloads, partial restarts or spawning new workers (e.g. SSL certificates for the built-in Apache webserver) require a complete restart of the whole node. edit: Regarding Power BI -- I feel that Tableau Server is (for better or worse) one of the killer features for many enterprise customers, because it means all of your data can remain within your own infrastructure and does not have to rely on external cloud providers. If that is not a requirement in your organisation, Power BI might make sense depending on your overall IT landscape, as well as your users' specific needs. On the other hand, if your organisation requires hosting things yourself, I guess it doesn't matter how miserable the experience is for you as an administrator. That's basically Tableau Server in a nutshell.

cudjocaverns 7y ago

With Salesforce banning certain firearms companies from using its services - how will this affect Tableau users who don't fit their new ban on these companies?

ruoyucad 7y ago

So what does this mean to Tableau using BI analysts out there? does it add values to my tableau certifications?

aheilbut 7y ago

At its core, Tableau is an implementation of a really elegant formalism to specify visualizations, and it's much more organized and declarative than something like Grammar of Graphics. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cstolte_thesis/

mateo411 7y ago

Looker, Periscope, and Tableau have all been acquired or merged in the last six weeks. Periscope merged with another BI start up Sisense. Looker and Tableau were part of a multibillion dollar acquisitions. It's an interesting time for this space.

SanchoPanda 7y ago

I'm shocked to see this not being a better day for Elastic. While still quite narrow with ELK stack, the elasticsearch backend is something that many more companies can make useful quickly given how non-finicky it is.

bhouston 7y ago

I was recruited for one of the first engineering positions at Tableau a very long time ago, but I turned it down as it just wasn't interesting enough. I think I was targetted in part because I was a SIGGRAPH presenter/author as one of the co-founders, Pat Hanrahan, was big into SIGGRAPH. Oh well. It is a great success for a brilliant computer graphics professor: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/ http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/

williesleg 7y ago

Yay! And the fucking needful is being done

nigealj 7y ago

They paid for a bubble (Tableau stock) using another bubble (CRM stock). So all is good in the funny world that we live in.

crispyambulance 7y ago

I think that many folks don't remember or know about how the word "BI" [business intelligence] was born. Back in the day corporations paid programmers and consulting companies millions of dollars for the purpose of building out applications with databases upon which to digitize their business processes. This was a great for a couple decades, up until some time in the 90's. It was at that point that expectations had caught up with digitization and having your battle-axes in accounting/order-entry/supply-chain do their keyboard magic on green-screens just wasn't cutting it. To actually understand what was going on, managers had to ask for specific reports from these people and they were just not in a position to do the reports as well has get their own ever-increasing-shit done. Let alone whatever the hell sales was doing. For a control-freak in management this just isn't acceptable. They started to find ways to "serve themselves". Eventually someone had the idea to hook the enterprise databases into their own zany spreadsheets. It was amazing. There was such a fountain of knowledge and insight that it made the people who could do that seem like relative geniuses. Almost "intelligent" in their business jobs. Thus, "Business Intelligence" was born. "Business Intelligence" is the practice of making badly-designed opaque shit from brutal, inscrutable business applications... visible. Only now are makers of enterprise applications starting to get it (or pretend to get it).

jonloyens 7y ago

I'm the CPO at a SaaS data catalog and analysis hub company called data.world - I was at the Snowflake Summit when the Looker acquisition by Google was announced - the guys at their booth seemed pretty happy ;) With Google snapping up Looker ($2.6B) for Google Cloud, Salesforce's much bigger purchase of Tableau is a clear sign that the big guys see buying BI tools is a good way to expand the reach of their offerings into more of the business. We talk to companies every day that have made massive investments in data warehouses, viz tools, and high-paid data scientists, but they still aren't agile enough because they can't tie it all together so their people can find and use the right data when they need it. I read an article once about the failure of self serve BI and the reality is that you just end up creating more sprawl. People need tools to reduce the clutter and sprawl and stop the endless chain of emails trying to figure out what table to look at or query to use or if your source is still updating. We built our data catalog and analysis hub for exactly this, and it's extremely validating to see the big guys like Salesforce and Google investing in expanding the user base of big data tools and I really hope we can be part of the solution of sorting it all out!

samstave 7y ago
Looker is way better than tableau. Lets break it down: Both are over priced Lookeer, however has LookerML Tableau obfuscates all code. Looker has easier bolt-ons to redshift/postgres Tableau's BI tool-set is weaker than looker, albeit, wider spread (more mature) So, I think google got a steal and SF is playing catch-up... at a high cost. Plus SF's sunk costs in eveything is going to make a 15B buy take at least two decades to pay off....
- CGamesPlay 7y ago
  I disagree with you! Looker is more advanced, and that does not mean it is better. Tableau’s tools were MUCH easier for me to make ad hoc analyses with, as well as to create dashboard with. Yes, there were some transformations that I couldn’t apply and had to go to custom SQL or ETL for, but the total time to finish my analyses and produce high-quality live dashboards was much less than with Looker. (I don’t know why you are being downvoted though, you’re entitled to an opinion same as me)

redstone08 7y ago

I think the value will be created from the data itself, less focus on data-processing skills. Of course, modeling skills will be still important at future, but data-processing would rather become much more easier. That's why self-bi tools like Tableau, Elastic search are becoming more and more popular. I am personally focusing on Metatron Discovery, which is an Open-Sourced Big data analytics platform for citizen scientists. Link : https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery

1290cc 7y ago

Very happy for the Tableau folks, they are great to work with! My firm uses Informatica's IICS to output all of the datasets for Tableau to visualize, its not as exciting as the hundreds of frameworks and languages that do the same but it works reliably and I don't have to hire expensive data scientists to get the job done or switch tech every few years to whatever is the flavor of the month. We take the 80/20 approach that most questions the business asks can be answered with Informatica. The last 20% we save for our developers and the odd data scientist to help us with.