

Tableau files for IPO - benhamner
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/04/02/tableau-files-for-ipo-as-strong-run-for-business-software-continues/

======
benhamner
Interesting stats from their S-1
([http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1303652/00011931251...](http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1303652/000119312513138700/d469057ds1.htm)):

\- $127.7m 2012 revenue

\- 749 full time employees at end of 2012

\- 70% of revenue from product licenses; 30% from services

\- 11,000 customer accounts

\- No customer represented more than 5% of total revenue

~~~
carterschonwald
thats a really really durable robust company profile. Congrats to them.

~~~
kiskis
I'm not in the knowledge to evaluate company performance, but is net income of
$1.6mm on $127mm revenue counts a robust company? In the last 3 years they had
a similar % for net income/revenue, their employee count is linear with their
revenue.

~~~
seivan
I am curious though, is 1.6mm out of 127 a bad thing or a good thing? My
knowledge in this area is abysmal :) Honest question. 1.6m profit is a decent
thing though after costs.

~~~
mynegation
Usually company is compared with other vendors in the same industry. E.g.
Qliktech (NASDAQ:QLIK) in 2012 had net income of ~3,839,000 on the revenue of
~388,537,000 which is a profit margin of 0.99% vs Tableau's 1.26%.

------
dirtyaura
This is an interesting view to a modern B2B sw licensing business, which is
not SaaS. Their Sales & Marketing expenses are about 50% of their revenues,
R&D is 25% and administration is 13%. Combined sales and admin costs are 63%.
In the previous years, Sales has been a tad above 65% of their revenues and
combined sales and admin costs have been above 80%. Quite a drop! What did
they do?

I assume that BI tools are quite hard to sell, as they require non-trivial
amount of integration to existing systems, but it is interesting to compare to
this other B2B companies. For example SalesForce's combined sales and
administrative costs are 78% of their revenue. Tableau's competitor QlikView
has combined sales and admin costs at 75% of their revenue.

------
mappu
Maybe i haven't seen the insides of enough large companies - but watching
their demo video, this sort of product seems to glimpse past what LtU call the
'middle-ages' of programming. Like seeing map, fold and CPS for the first
time. I spend _how_ much time writing graphs, charts, filters, sql, password
reset interfaces by hand for my SaaS with my web stack?

The coolest part for me is someone here has what seems like a quite pure
software gig, writing interfaces with no real need to care for the underlying
business, only for the data adapters. Mostly if you're working with business
software the result would be polluted by some specific business logic or
domain knowledge.

(Excuse the gushing, that video blew me away slightly.)

~~~
smiler
I've used a few BI tools and it blows everything else out of the water - this
is the first tool I've come across where I feel like end users could actually
create the reports they want with it.

------
mrjaeger
Title should be renamed to reflect that revenue is $127.7mm, thought this was
going to be an article decrying the crazy valuations some tech companies get.

~~~
benhamner
Whoops! Unfortunate typo. Hopefully a mod will fix

~~~
benatkin
I just added the m subconsciously.

------
jimmytucson

        "...the idea that companies needed simpler ways to visualize big data and databases."
    

Maybe I'm late to the party but is "big data" now just another way of saying
"data"? More and more it seems like anyone who uses a database is mixing it up
with "big data".

~~~
d4nt
I think big data is a bad term, the key issue is whether you're using data to
drive your decision making, not how much of it you have or what storage
technology your using. If you're Amazon or Facebook then, sure, you've got to
crunch through many TB to get to an answer, if you're an insurance broker
turning over $100m from 2000 customers then there's no way making a business
decision should need more than a few SQL queries on relational databases. But
saying you're into big data is now almost a shorthand for saying, we analyse
our data and use that to drive our decision making.

------
dude_abides
Do companies, at this stage, announce what the IPO issuing price (or market
cap) will be? If so, what is theirs? If not, any guesses what it will be?

It is not in Splunk's league, but it is definitely a solid product, with a
great growth prospect.

~~~
jsmeaton
I'm currently looking into web based BI tools and have Tableau on my radar at
the moment. Is splunk able to do traditional relational database reporting for
business users or is the value more in IT operations? I'm googling, but
finding a whole lot of handwaving.

~~~
thingsilearned
Splunk is not able to. Check us out at chartio.com

~~~
atwebb
This comes across as juvenile and shady. At least expand on it a bit.

------
glaugh
I can't believe the stock symbol "DATA" wasn't taken already.

~~~
nthitz
I wonder, now that a lot of stock symbols are taken, if we will see more
vanity type symbols like this. Reminds me of the evolution of domain name
usage.

~~~
acchow
Vanity?

~~~
atwebb
DATA doesn't represent the company name, similar to the recent RIM change, a
marketing/vanity piece.

------
futhey
Woo not a lot of Seattle IPOs!

