Tableau Positioning

Question 1

Tableau’s Product Development team has taken the following philosophical points about metadata:

Answer 1

Analysis must be possible without first undertaking a metadata modeling exercise.Metadata in existing systems should be leveraged when beneficial.Metadata is a useful abstraction, but it should not be constraining.Metadata are defaults that can be changed at runtime.Business users don’t need to understand metadata to be successful.

Question 2

Tableau’s metadata model has 2 layers of abstraction and a run-time model that allow simplicity, flexibility and reusability.

Answer 2

Connection. Data Model. VizQL Model.

Question 3

Connection (metadata model)

Answer 3

ServerConnection AttributesTablesJoins

Question 4

Data Model (metadata model)

Answer 4

DefaultsComments/DescriptionsCalculationsAliasesUser Created Fields

Question 5

VizQL Model (metadata model)

Answer 5

FiltersAggregationsBlendsRolesTable Calculations

Question 6

Customer Satisfaction

Answer 6

Customers remain extremely happy with Tableau (for the fourth year in a row). This was a key factor in having the highest ability to execute score in the entire Gartner survey.

Question 7

Ease of Use

Answer 7

73% selected Tableau’s product for ease of use, which place it among the top two vendors in the Gartner survey.

Question 8

Low Cost to Implement

Answer 8

Tableau customers reported one of the lowest implementation costs per user of any vendor in the survey.

Question 9

Product Score (Gartner)

Answer 9

Tableau earned one of the top aggregate, weighted average product scores (even when adjusted for enterprise deployments).

Question 10

Product Features Score (Gartner)

Answer 10

Tableau ranked 1 or 2 in the Gartner survey in the following categories:DashboardsBusiness User Data MashupGeospatial IntelligenceMobileInteractive Visualization Capabilities

Question 11

Mobile

Answer 11

Tableau has one of the highest percentages of users actively deploying mobile BI in the Gartner survey. Because it’s so easy, author once view anywhere.

Question 12

Data Volume

Answer 12

Customers report average deployment sizes in terms of users, with data volumes among the best in the Gartner survey as a result of Tableau’s direct query access.

Question 13

In-Memory Data Engine (Gartner)

Answer 13

Can be used as an alternative to, or in, hyrbrid mode with its direct query access, enables fast performance on large and multisource datasets and on complex queries, such as very large multidimensional filters.

Question 14

Migration

Answer 14

Despite frequent new product releases requiring customer to upgrade, Tableau customers gave it one of the lowest scores for migration complexity (lower means easier); over 90% of its surveyed customers were on the latest release of the software.

Question 15

What does the business intelligence landscape look like?

Answer 15

Tableau is witnessing in the business intelligence market a broad, market shift towards Tableau’s way of doing things. If you look at our financial results, I hope by now this is self-evident, but I just want to make sure it is spoken – Tableau is bringing easy, visual, affordable, analytics products to the business intelligence market in a way that has never before been achieved.The business intelligence market today, if you just look at the products customers can go buy, the business intelligence products that currently dominate the industry are complicated and difficult to use, and slow-moving, and inflexible, and expensive. And I mean every one of those words. And into that frustrating customer landscape, Tableau is bringing an easy for everyone, affordable, fast-moving alternative. That is what we’re doing.

Question 16

What types of customers have been buying Tableau?

Answer 16

Tableau has witnessed a dramatic shift in the business intelligence market toward’s Tableau’s way of doing things. Customers have shown a tremendous appetite for easy for everyone, affordable, fast-moving alternatives to the difficult to use, slow-moving and inflexible products that the market traditionally offers.So given that, the large deals that we are closing are happening with customers of all shapes and sizes. They’re occurring with Fortune 500 companies, they’re occurring with universities, they’re occurring with non-profits. They’re occurring with government agencies, they’re occurring with think tanks and consultancies. They world is thirsty for products that help them see and understand the data they have in their databases and spreadsheets, and Tableau is the first mass-market product available, and as a result, we’re seeing large deal products in all of our segments.

Question 17

Why do people buy Tableau in traditional cases?

Answer 17

Well let me tell you what they have in common. And then I’ll tell you what I think are the reasons people buy, and how they differ from one to another. What they have in common is that most customers out there just picture a Fortune 500 division, or a regional manufacturer, or a university or a government agency or a nonprofit, or a small business for that matter.Just picture an organization. It has some data stored in databases, and in spreadsheets, and in places like salesforce.com and NetSuite. And they typically want to answer questions using that data. They want to answer questions, they want to make better decisions, they want to roll out executive dashboards, and roll out faster and more interactive reports, and they want to produce visualizations that can be used to persuade and inform people of what’s going on.In short, they want to use facts to create data-driven informed decisions for their organization. That’s what they all have in common.Now I think to the spirit of your question, compared to the alternative products that have traditionally been available in this business analytics marketplace, some customers adopt Tableau primarily because it is 10 times faster than the traditional product. And that’s just why they buy. They say, “hey look. I can complete my data dashboard project in six months using the alternative, or I can do it in six days using Tableau.” It’s literally that dramatic a difference between how fast you can do things, and that’s why some customers buy.There’s another reason people buy. Which is a lot of these buyers that I describe also want to put data into the hands of more of their people, and these traditional systems, these traditional, enterprise business intelligence platforms that have been available in the market, they are so complicated to use and so expensive that only a small priesthood of people use them within the company. And yet most executives who lead these companies, going all the way to the presidents of companies and universities – they’re saying “look, I want data and business analytics in the hands of all of my people.”I want everyone consulting facts before they make decisions. Not a few. And so compared to these traditional alternatives, Tableau is a self-service business analytics product. It enables companies to take business analytics out of just the IT function and put it into the hands of all the decision makers in the company, and that’s a second reason people buy, and of course some buyers are a combination of both.