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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My interpretation of the rise of tools like Looker & Tableau is that they happened in part because of that '07-'08 acquisition spree. Neither IBM not SAP capitalized on their investments, and instead their products mostly stagnated. Cognos 11 for example looks more modern bit really isn't much more than a re-skin of a product that hasn't changed much since the release of 8.x. At some point IBM had a Watson-branded product that was supposed to be a Tableau competitor, but it never really materialized and was near completely divorced from Cognos.
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.
PowerBI wants to be Tableau based on the number of times Microsoft sales has demoed and whatnot.
But I haven’t met databiz people who switched from tableau to PBI. I’m not sure why as they look pretty similar on paper.
I think Tableau’s mental model is about exporting and storytelling while PBI is about reporting.
Personally, I find it harder to work with PBI because it’s the only license model more confusing that Tableau. And there’s no Tableau Public equivalent.
This - we had power pivot in excel - then for some licensing reasons we didn’t. I know how to buy excel and firms buy it blindly - tie power bi into that sales channel
I think PowerBI compares with Tableau quite favorably. For the most part PowerBI is a clone of Tableau, but it goes farther and adds in much more powerful scripting(M, Python, R), a library of custom visuals, Power Query which is a nice GUI for data transformation, and deep formula language (DAX). I think it's easy for an Excel or Tableau user to pick up in a day, but it scales much more as you have more data analysis expertise.
Also MS has been improving it like crazy over the past few years. They clearly want to maintain their dominance in the data analysis space, but see the winds shifting away from Excel and are not waiting to become irrelevant.
The model isn't that a business user would use Python or R. Rather, a data scientist shares live-computed analytics to business users through a report / dashboard.
> 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.
Thats why their non-technical user abstraction is a worthwhile investment for businesses who want their devs to be doing real work instead of pandering to the latest whims of a product director / marketing exec
I think you might be surprised at how many people do know what a join is, they may call it another name, but it's not a hard concept to understand. It's a very common thing I've seen non-technical people do and use.
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.
I once accidentally spawned a five-person department at a Fortune 50 company because I threw together a Django app that integrated with Active Directory and dynamically displayed a few reports that were relevant to the logged-in user's role in the organization.
I was in Corporate Strategy, and one of the C-level execs saw it. They realized that I could add new reports in a few days by myself instead of going through IT, and within a year they'd hired a new manager to run my little group and three others developers - who weren't technically developers, because we weren't part of IT.
For another ~3 years, the company's primary reporting tool for front-line operations employees lived on a repurposed desktop being used as a server that was plugged in under my desk. We did get a nice, beefy SQL Server and a decent UPS, so it wasn't a complete shoestring project.
I left shortly after IT discovered they'd been cut out of the loop on a critical business process and demanded that the whole system be rewritten in C#.
"I left shortly after IT discovered they'd been cut out of the loop on a critical business process and demanded that the whole system be rewritten in C#."
been there, done that. you have to get them on the phone early and do the whole "oh you're so great" song and dance to prevent ego bruising.
when i scope projects for clients if I have to engage with their IT department I add 6-8 weeks of implementation minimum. Anything from getting a CSR signed to SSO integration is always an excruciating experience. Going over the SOW and hitting on that item always results in a slow, exhausted, but accepting sigh from the client.
At my last job I had a nontechnical boss, and I would have been ecstatic if he had a) enough of a clue to try screwing around with SQL, and b) the wisdom and humility to ask for help.
Yeah, I occasionally have to visit folks and walk them through extremely basic things like sorting data in Excel and creating pivot tables (very much not my job, I'm general purpose BI development mixed with statistical analysis & ML) but I never begrudge those meetings because it means the user is trying to become empowered to work more independently. No matter the specific skill level, that's something I can get behind.
From personal experience, Tableu has saved my team countless hours adding reporting features to our products just because some middle manager on another team got a hair in their butt, so I can see the value.
I'm not the OP but having dealt with QuickSight it really feels super flaky and difficult to create graphs with. I can't remember the exact problems my co-worker had problems with it, but if I recall correctly one of the problems was that QuickSight expected all JSON data keys in S3 to be in the exact same order in every file thus making changing the schema a very huge pain in the butt. Also the UI itself is not good and creating eg running monthly average was very non-intuitive. A lot of small stuff that makes you not wanting to deal with it if possible. But it's cheap and has good AWS integration so I guess it has its purposes.
I love Redash, but Tableau has a much larger set of features. Redash is pretty good at queries and basic charting. Tableau is pretty good at queries and basic charting, but also offers a bunch of extra visualization types, predictive analysis, native cohort tools, etc, etc.
(That being said, I think a lot of teams are quick to reach for heavyweight tools like Tableau when Redash would be perfectly good for what they need at far less cost)
1) An effective tool for people to explore data (with a relatively low barrier to entry - some training required).
2) An effective dashboard authoring tool (i.e. to make small specialized data reporting apps) which are simple enough to be used by anyone without training. These dashboards typically give some sort of situational-awareness for key performance indicators (KPI) such as sales, inventory, etc and are highly specialized for a specific use or role.
It's like Access for business people and in many cases gets driven by the business, not IT. In many cases, it cuts out the IT SMEs that govern access to something like business objects.
They also do a good job at seeding it in visible places. Alot of newspapers are using Tableau for infographics, etc.
At my place, somebody a while back drank the Tableau koolaid and quickly designed some nice looking graphs and sold the commercial team on its value, and the president signed a check for a license.
The software team was then tasked with putting the fancy graphs that guy did into our web application with the following constraints:
- the Tableau server can't be exposed on the public internet
- our UI can't indicate that it's using Tableau anywhere (i.e., use an iframe or something)
This turns out to be tricky. Tableau doesn't really like to be embedded in 3rd party applications, it leaks information about itself in a number of places. It requires that every person looking at the graph be a user according to Tableau's definition of user. Synchronizing authentication to Tableau server and workbook authorization gets tricky.
The next task coming up is that they want users to be able to ad-hoc schedule an email to themselves with the fancy graphs attached as a pdf, so we've got that to look forward to.
I worked on a data dashboard site that embedded Tableau workbooks. I found their JS API to be decent for embedding workbooks[0]. I used what Tableau calls "Trusted Authentication" to handle the authentication to Tableau Server[1]. It's harder if they are using Tableau Online.
>The next task coming up is that they want users to be able to ad-hoc schedule an email to themselves with the fancy graphs attached as a pdf, so we've got that to look forward to.
This is the endgame of every OLAP tool. But execs really love this feature.
Making fancy graphs beyond standard spreadsheet templates can become time consuming / labour intensive very quickly. More enlightened companies will not hesitate ot pay for Tableau if it relieves their 6-figure salary data scientists from reporting/dashboarding work.
The primary value is making interactive data visualizations with minimal effort. I can go from nothing to having something in the user's hands in less than a day, complete with things like tooltips, dynamic filters, parameters, etc.
Imagine how useless an airline website would be if it were non interactive reports of all the data for the day loaded onto one page. Good dashboards are interactive, not passive reports.
>This change in approach could be equated to going to individual airline websites to check routes, dates, times and fares of flights as opposed to just going to a website like Orbitz or Travelocity – punching in where I want to go and when, and it pulls in a report of all the flights that meet my criteria. I can then narrow those results down by a number of criteria – time of day, number of stops, price, etc. It’s self-service reporting in the truest form.
Coming from an enterprise background in BI using traditional tools like Cognos and Business objects, Tableau is head an shoulders above these. It's not only significantly easier to build complex interactive dashboards with Tableau, Tableau enables a level of rapid data exploration that simply isn't possible in the traditional tools. In those, you pretty much needed to know exactly what you wanted to build, making it difficult to find new insights.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, that seems more like Walmart/Target not wanting to support their main competitor in the retail space (Amazon) even though it's a different division.
Is this somewhat common? It makes intuitive sense, but the big 3 or 4 or whatever number it is (IBM, P&Y, etc) consultancies have "use us for everything" as their explicit strategy / part of their sales pitch.
So while they might lose customers like you, there is clearly ridiculously large piles of money up for grabs if they diversify their products, rather than remain specialized. And, of course, any sufficiently good specialist is at risk of being acquired by one of these behemoth generalists.
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.
> 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).
If Salesforce wants to run my entire underlying data infrastructure, I think we’re in trouble. I see this more of a land grab, with SaaS vendors trying to push their own BI stacks and create an even tighter era of lock-in. I don’t think it is necessarily a good thing.
Data is an asset and liability - when somebody else has all of yours in their proprietary platform and under the control of their cloud, that is a scary proposition to me.
Fair enough if you are running your infrastructure on open standard tech and common cloud platforms, but not locked away in Salesforce.
This is reminding me of the behavior of other large orgs, like Oracle.
On the flip side, if Salesforce does not own its own BI stack, their customer might go to a different vendor that has better integration (i.e.: Microsoft PowerBI).
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.
Thanks, this is a good tool. There’s a few libs that spit out d3, but the UI isn’t as usable. Tableau is popular with the Excel crowd that I’ve been able to work with.
A lot of companies use Tableau to visualize their data. In the future if they want to use Tableau they (speculation) might have to host their data in SalesForce and/or be directed to use a number of other SalesForce features if they want the latest coolest dashboards. To me this acquisition seems be a play toward growing customer usage of SalesForce licensed functions and data migration to their cloud, rather than based on the current revenue stream. The lock-in is strong.
SalesForce has been pushing Einstein Analytics recently. I haven't used it, but I do see that moving an organization from Tableau to Einstein has a lot of costs involved so this would be a hard sell in many places. Having them both under one roof means they're able to bring a bunch of people across to their cloud and now that license revenue year over year is theirs with the additional data lock-in.
As someone that really dislikes vendor-forced lock-in and generally dislikes the way SalesForce controls your data, rate limits, maxes, licensing, etc, this move is about even more control up your stack that will seem like a "no brainer" to decisionmakers, which is dangerous. That said, I'm sure it will work well for some organizations.
EDIT: I would also love to see them spit out D3 or other open visual but then they'd be losing control of the secret sauce and the requirement for a license. Not sure there is an incentive to go that route.
My company is using Einstein Analytics, however, other than the Salesforce integration has been a terrible disappointing experience. Loading data is a pain and has to be done to a custom API. Of course Einstein analytics need to have it is own language called SAQL resulting in a steep learning curve.
That sounds right. This acquisition maybe gets rid of the curve there and for orgs like mine that use Tableau and SalesForce it sounds simpler / easier in future (Einstein has conversion and learning costs as you say). However, that comes with a cost - loss of any freedom to use your data without worrying about arbitrary license changes and cost. The way they structure the licensing will be interesting since they’ll have leverage over any customers.
yeah i put in another comment that this acquisition is a vote of non confidence in Einstein Analytics. You may see it phased out in the next few years.
Yeah SalesForce NEEDS Tableau. It is like a missing puzzle piece in their suite. Einstein is essentially enhanced reporting for SalesForce even though they sell it as an analytics tool.
Last year they acuired Empirical Systems, "an eight-person artificial intelligence startup based in Cambridge, Mass" [1].
However, 'Tableau Research' [2] has existed for years and its researchers regularly publish at major academic visualisation conferences like IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST) and EuroVis (see [3]).
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).
Sort of. Salesforce is more interested in selling cloud licenses and space. They push proprietary apps and such, but maybe they won’t care so much about hosting tableau server specifically.
Tableau worksheets and dashboards are proprietary and need either Tableau Reader on the client’s desktop or Tableau Server to run proprietary server side stuff for the js libraries to draw it. This is expensive to license their server and limited in how you can host. In many situations the data is small enough to send to the client.
It would be nice if tableau would just generate static content that could be hosted anywhere.
There’s not a client tool for d3 as nice as tableau. I work with lots of scientists who learned tableau but aren’t really programmers and can’t figure out d3 or other libraries.
I have worked with some companies that love Tableau so much, they use the desktop and server versions a lot. The licensing costs are high, but it does the job.
Because they are the clear market leader in the category, have been for a long time, only recently falling behind Microsoft. (within the last 2 years of their 20 years as a company.) Give it a year or two to integrate into Salesforce and they will be neck and neck. This is just as much a bailout to Tableau to save them from being dwarfed by Microsoft.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
Back when I was at a company that had frequent ETL needs, we tried a few, and eventually settled on Rhino ETL. It's not a pretty drag-n-drop tool like some of the others but it was simple and (therefore) worked really well.
I did some integration work with the venerable Pentaho project some years ago. It's got both an Enterprise edition and a Community edition that's open source with tools including ETL and more. https://wiki.pentaho.com/ looks like the best place to start these days.
Also second this, product guy here who has been using Tableau for years. Curious about Meltano. Went through some of the site / installation guide / videos and then the gitlab issues log and then found myself back here :)
Would like to see a few simple, visual stories about how one could derive business value from meltano, ideally real-life use-cases but if you dont have those yet just make them up.
Thank you for taking a look, you're right and we are working on it right now. This is perhaps a little more attention than we expected for our tiny 5 person project, and lights a great fire under us!
Here we all are in the comments complaining about how all the focus is on front end instead of fixing the back end, and one of the first comments to a legit alternative is "yeah so what's it look like?" !!
Funny coincidence: I was reading about you in relation to Mattermark, then found your blog post on Meltano, and now I find your comment on HN. You're everywhere! :)
Would it be possible to chat with you about your past experience at Mattermark? I am trying to answer a few questions (not related to the company, but related to VCs and investing). If so, my HN username @ gmail. Thanks!
The work you are doing at Meltano is simply brilliant. It needs to be done and if done well I have no doubt you will be very successful. I plan to use it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
So is Google making a play for Saleforce’s core business? I don’t know a lot about the details of what Salesforce does but from my view it looks like there is not that much overlap
As I think about it, I don't see this as a play for business or much of direct competition at all, they simply both had strategic gaps, but for very different reasons, in their BI/Analytics offerings.
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.)
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.
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.
First, how do you know what all institutional investors are thinking?
Second, Sales and FCF straddle Earnings on the income statement. A focus on EV/Sales suggests that investors are optimistic about growth and ignoring the spending required to get there. A focus on EV/FCF suggests that investors are optimistic about increased efficiency and cutting costs.
My guess is that Salesforce was also in the race to acquire Looker, and since that fell through they picked up Tableau because they had sunk the work into acquiring a data visualization company. The timing is uncanny, but the price tag is vastly different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
I would NOT recommend it unless you have deep pockets for syncing to a 3rd party database like Amazon RDS or Heroku connect. Mostly because your database schema will go to shit real fast either because business users will modify it arbitrarily or because you'll struggle to understand the performance implications / indexing requirements of various Salesforce tooling.
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
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadNot 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.
Birst end up getting acquired too. https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to-acquire-birst-infor
This is true, because Thoma is a PE firm and is literally in the business of acquiring and selling companies.
But now, Salesforce now has a bigger war chest to play with.
Looks like BI is the new hotness.
Personally I'm really interested in who if anyone will buy Snowflake.
But I haven’t met databiz people who switched from tableau to PBI. I’m not sure why as they look pretty similar on paper.
I think Tableau’s mental model is about exporting and storytelling while PBI is about reporting.
Personally, I find it harder to work with PBI because it’s the only license model more confusing that Tableau. And there’s no Tableau Public equivalent.
https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/where-is-power-pivo...
Also MS has been improving it like crazy over the past few years. They clearly want to maintain their dominance in the data analysis space, but see the winds shifting away from Excel and are not waiting to become irrelevant.
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.
I was in Corporate Strategy, and one of the C-level execs saw it. They realized that I could add new reports in a few days by myself instead of going through IT, and within a year they'd hired a new manager to run my little group and three others developers - who weren't technically developers, because we weren't part of IT.
For another ~3 years, the company's primary reporting tool for front-line operations employees lived on a repurposed desktop being used as a server that was plugged in under my desk. We did get a nice, beefy SQL Server and a decent UPS, so it wasn't a complete shoestring project.
I left shortly after IT discovered they'd been cut out of the loop on a critical business process and demanded that the whole system be rewritten in C#.
been there, done that. you have to get them on the phone early and do the whole "oh you're so great" song and dance to prevent ego bruising.
No copy-paste visuals
No styling multiple visuals
No auto generation of reports
No option to add comments / more text around graphs (this one is ridiculous)
(That being said, I think a lot of teams are quick to reach for heavyweight tools like Tableau when Redash would be perfectly good for what they need at far less cost)
1) An effective tool for people to explore data (with a relatively low barrier to entry - some training required).
2) An effective dashboard authoring tool (i.e. to make small specialized data reporting apps) which are simple enough to be used by anyone without training. These dashboards typically give some sort of situational-awareness for key performance indicators (KPI) such as sales, inventory, etc and are highly specialized for a specific use or role.
They also do a good job at seeding it in visible places. Alot of newspapers are using Tableau for infographics, etc.
The software team was then tasked with putting the fancy graphs that guy did into our web application with the following constraints:
- the Tableau server can't be exposed on the public internet
- our UI can't indicate that it's using Tableau anywhere (i.e., use an iframe or something)
This turns out to be tricky. Tableau doesn't really like to be embedded in 3rd party applications, it leaks information about itself in a number of places. It requires that every person looking at the graph be a user according to Tableau's definition of user. Synchronizing authentication to Tableau server and workbook authorization gets tricky.
The next task coming up is that they want users to be able to ad-hoc schedule an email to themselves with the fancy graphs attached as a pdf, so we've got that to look forward to.
[0] https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/api/js_api/en-us/Java... [1] https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/trusted_...
This is the endgame of every OLAP tool. But execs really love this feature.
>This change in approach could be equated to going to individual airline websites to check routes, dates, times and fares of flights as opposed to just going to a website like Orbitz or Travelocity – punching in where I want to go and when, and it pulls in a report of all the flights that meet my criteria. I can then narrow those results down by a number of criteria – time of day, number of stops, price, etc. It’s self-service reporting in the truest form.
https://portal.key2act.com/Blog/2017/07/Power-BI-choose-cons...
https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring19/rele...
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.
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.
Actually does Amazon's marketplace make any profit?
So while they might lose customers like you, there is clearly ridiculously large piles of money up for grabs if they diversify their products, rather than remain specialized. And, of course, any sufficiently good specialist is at risk of being acquired by one of these behemoth generalists.
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.
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).
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-salesforce-buys-israeli-c...
Data is an asset and liability - when somebody else has all of yours in their proprietary platform and under the control of their cloud, that is a scary proposition to me.
Fair enough if you are running your infrastructure on open standard tech and common cloud platforms, but not locked away in Salesforce.
This is reminding me of the behavior of other large orgs, like Oracle.
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.
SalesForce has been pushing Einstein Analytics recently. I haven't used it, but I do see that moving an organization from Tableau to Einstein has a lot of costs involved so this would be a hard sell in many places. Having them both under one roof means they're able to bring a bunch of people across to their cloud and now that license revenue year over year is theirs with the additional data lock-in.
As someone that really dislikes vendor-forced lock-in and generally dislikes the way SalesForce controls your data, rate limits, maxes, licensing, etc, this move is about even more control up your stack that will seem like a "no brainer" to decisionmakers, which is dangerous. That said, I'm sure it will work well for some organizations.
EDIT: I would also love to see them spit out D3 or other open visual but then they'd be losing control of the secret sauce and the requirement for a license. Not sure there is an incentive to go that route.
However, 'Tableau Research' [2] has existed for years and its researchers regularly publish at major academic visualisation conferences like IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST) and EuroVis (see [3]).
[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/tableau-acquires-mit-ai-spinof...
[2]: https://research.tableau.com/
[3]: https://research.tableau.com/papers
CRM is a pretty darn good ticker for Salesforce. Why would you change it? It perfectly explains your core business
Perhaps in 5 years we'll look back at this move as a prime example of the bubble we're currently in.
Can you clarify?
It would be nice if tableau would just generate static content that could be hosted anywhere.
There’s not a client tool for d3 as nice as tableau. I work with lots of scientists who learned tableau but aren’t really programmers and can’t figure out d3 or other libraries.
You make it sound like the ticker symbol justifies a $15.7B price tag...
I think we are many years away from $15B vanity ticket symbols.
https://interworks.com/blog/ksloan/2019/04/03/the-2019-gartn...
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.
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.
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-...
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).
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?
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...
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.
It is still beta but should be ready to go in weeks.
Here's an example of the top 100 stories on Hacker News:
https://ohayo.computer?filename=help-for-hackernews.top.flow...
Contrast with https://www.tableau.com/, which has a sample graph and "See it in action" right at beginning.
In the meantime, one way to see more is to checkout our getting started guide: https://meltano.com/docs/quickstart.html and also our YouTube channel which has weekly "Demo Day" videos sharing our progress: https://www.youtube.com/meltano
Really appreciate you taking a look at what we're up to!
Would like to see a few simple, visual stories about how one could derive business value from meltano, ideally real-life use-cases but if you dont have those yet just make them up.
I'm not so sure, I'd probably be too worried about spiders to focus much.
Would it be possible to chat with you about your past experience at Mattermark? I am trying to answer a few questions (not related to the company, but related to VCs and investing). If so, my HN username @ gmail. Thanks!
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.
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&...
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.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/leaked-docu...
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!
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I work for PowerBI
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.
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.
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.
First, how do you know what all institutional investors are thinking?
Second, Sales and FCF straddle Earnings on the income statement. A focus on EV/Sales suggests that investors are optimistic about growth and ignoring the spending required to get there. A focus on EV/FCF suggests that investors are optimistic about increased efficiency and cutting costs.
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.
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.
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.
I think they evaluated very well
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.
Bad Database Schema === Bad Time
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
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.