
Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B - albertwang
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-buying-data-visualization-company-tableau-for-15-7b-in-all-stock-deal/
======
kfk
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.

~~~
qwert-e
> I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things
> like Vega are much more interesting.

In that case you may be interested in Dash (dash.plot.ly). It’s a free and
open source library that you can use to create dashboards online with Python
only.

~~~
ruoyucad
plotly aint exactly free, you get 25ish free plot and then you gotta pay.

~~~
nicolaskruchten
That's not totally accurate... If you use our SaaS Chart Studio product then
yes, but otherwise (i.e. in 'offline' mode) you can use our Python, R and
Javascript libraries as much as you like: they're MIT licensed.

~~~
nicolaskruchten
PS: and Dash, which is what the GP was talking about, is totally free and
unrelated to Chart Studio :)

------
dmor
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-...](https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-acquiring-
tableau-for-15-7b/)

~~~
victor106
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?

~~~
dmor
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...](https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/10/first-looker-and-tableau-
which-data-visualization-companies-are-likely-to-be-acquired-next/)

~~~
swuecho
thanks for the product. I checked Singer, DBT, both of which are great idea
and product. I build one very similar (conceptually) to DBT in my last data
project. (I would not if I knew dbt is there).

Airflow is too heavy weight for me, I use Scons to do the workflow management.

meltano must do a lot of work to integrate all this together. I wonder what is
the general user experience is. To me, seems too heavy weight.

~~~
dmor
Ideally, to abstract away complexity (which is what causes that “heavy”
feeling)

------
anonu
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".

~~~
dvdhsu
As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel,
etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I
thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with
nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.

If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called
Retool ([https://tryretool.com](https://tryretool.com)) that is essentially
Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell —
were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around,
and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So
you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users`
from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row
back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end
users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources
quickly.

If you guys have any feedback... I'd really appreciate it. We're just starting
out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!

~~~
scarejunba
When I looked into this a few months ago, your pricing didn’t make sense to
me. You’re saving developer time, but charging on user time. So I’ve got 800
people in this org and I could either pay a shit ton to use retool or just
build it from scratch. The difference between both of these is my time so it
makes sense I’d pay you for that.

That made it not viable for me. Building from scratch was way cheaper with
Upwork. Anyway, Product was cool.

~~~
dvdhsu
Thanks for the feedback — that's really helpful. I agree that our pricing
isn't good for a large org that is looking to build a tool or two (instead of
say, a few hundred).

Do you mind if I email you? (I can't see your email in your profile, but my
email is david@retool.in if you're interested in reaching out.) I'm really
curious — just to learn — what kind of pricing plan might work for you. Would
a per-app model work for you, for example? Thanks!

~~~
scarejunba
I've since left the company but one of my friends working there is the one who
suggested we try the product anyway. I'll tell him to contact you.

------
prepend
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.

~~~
ineedasername
_> This seems really high_

Precisely what I thought. It looks like their annual revenue is ~ $1 billion,
placing this price around 15x annual revenue.

However, Looker has about $131 million in revenue, so their purchase price was
an even higher 20x annual revenue.

My conclusion is that these acquisitions are much less about sales revenue and
much more about filling strategic holes in product offerings, and I can only
assume it's a sellers market in that area.

~~~
icelancer
Multiplers don't scale linearly. The lower your valuation, the more possible
it is to get a higher multiple for various reasons (cash, # of bidders in the
market, etc).

At $1B/year in revenue there aren't a lot of companies that can realistically
acquire you. At $131MM/year, there are.

But still I agree. Both are quite high.

------
cujic9
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.

~~~
SilasX
Interestingly, I think an earlier version of the title had "in all-stock
deal", but I think the mods removed it. I wish they hadn't, as that's an
important detail for the reasons you mention. (Also, ask James Baker, who was
convinced by Goldman Sachs to sell Dragon Naturally Speaking in an all-stock
deal ... of a company that turned out to be the Belgian Enron.)

~~~
kradroy
I was in speech recognition tech during that time. It all tanked, but Dragon
got screwed the hardest. ScanSoft (now Nuance) made out like a bandit with all
the tech fire sales post-bust.

~~~
SilasX
Yeah, I can't imagine how Baker (and all the employee-shareholders) must have
felt about being advised not to do the standard half-cash-half-stock purchase
and then turn out to be a fraud so soon.

------
cl42
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
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.

~~~
Gpetrium
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.

~~~
Spooky23
> If you are fully dependent on a single vendor, the cost of migrating tends
> to skyrocket and the negotiating power moves towards the vendor.

This is particularly important with SaaS, as you lack the leverage to walk
away. If you're fighting with a vendor, you had best resolve it by your
contract date, as they will happily shut you off and wait for you grovel (and
pay).

------
dgudkov
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
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
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
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)

------
jonloyens
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
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
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)

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

~~~
ineedasername
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__
The data storage limit increased quite a bit just a few months ago:

[https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-
us/spring19/rele...](https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-
us/spring19/release-notes/rn_storage.htm)

------
rmk2
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
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
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.

------
chasd00
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

~~~
raphtheb
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
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.

~~~
raphtheb
Ha! We most likely did in some fashion. It sure is a small world out there.
All the best!

------
Gpetrium
If we look at Gartner's Analytics & BI magic quadrant from Feb 2019
([https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B02387...](https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B0238781B1.ashx))
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
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
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
Reproducibility is the number one rule in (data) science...

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

------
ben_jones
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
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
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
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.

------
sireat
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.

~~~
turtlebits
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
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.

~~~
turtlebits
Are you teaching how to use Tableau (the product) or Data science/BI? Because
I don't think you should be learning how to use a specific software product at
school unless it's vocational.

That said, I don't see why any student couldn't continue using the free Public
version.

~~~
sireat
You are aware how crippled the free Tableau version is? Just public dashboards
no saving functionality at all.

Judging by the sparsity of the public dashboards seemingly no one is using the
free version.

As bduerst said, learning Tableau is only useful if your employer will be
paying for it.

So I briefly cover Power BI and concentrate on Python. I'd rather spend more
time on various visualization methods in Python.

------
brightball
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.

------
ackbar03
I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data
doesn't it? What's new about it?

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

It's really easy for business users to point it at a database and get started
on their own, exploring the data. It feels like it has a much lower barrier to
entry than many other reporting tools.

And once you win the hearts of executives, that's kind of the end of that
discussion. It's a really sticky product.

~~~
tyingq
Also, the business users can combine data sources and do joins. Instead of
waiting for IT to produce the right views.

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

~~~
cirgue
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.

~~~
marcinzm
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.

------
crispyambulance
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).

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

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

------
bhouston
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/)

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

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SanchoPanda
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.

------
1290cc
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.

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btbuildem
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).

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aheilbut
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/)

------
themark
Not very surprising, they have been looking at them for a while.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-
docu...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-document-
listed-tableau-among-salesforces-potential-acquisition-targets/)

------
iamgopal
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
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.

------
alvern
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
yeah I see Alteryx or something similar as their next purchase. All they are
missing now is a ETL solution.

~~~
8EC301AA
What do you call Mulesoft?

~~~
oicu812
The #6 tool behind Informatica, Dell Boomi, Jitterbit, Workato and SnapLogic
according to Gartner.

~~~
8EC301AA
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&...](https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6P7GS86&ct=190517&st=sb)

------
mateo411
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.

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

------
redstone08
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)

------
code4tee
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.

~~~
ineedasername
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.

------
bondolo
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
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.

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

~~~
lelima
~15B vs ~2B

I think they evaluated very well

------
albertwang
Salesforce Press release: [https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-
press/press-releases...](https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-
releases/2019/06/191006-f/)

------
teilo
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
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.

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

------
luizb
Dear techcrunch: I will NOT disable my adblock

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

~~~
olivermarks
They are arguably essentially buying revenue to help their bottom line.
Salesforce hopes to add $350-400M to their FY20 revenue

~~~
ineedasername
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.

