By Olivia Cahoon
Founded in 2003, Tableau is a public software company headquartered in Seattle, WA, with more than 3,100 employees across 17 global offices. While serving more than 57,000 customer organizations, the company’s mission is to help people see and understand data.
Tableau produces business intelligence and analytics software and offers solutions in the enterprise and cloud. In in Software Magazine’s 2016 Software 500, Tableau reported an annual revenue of $653,590,000, coming in at number 127. The company’s reported revenue grew 58.40 percent since 2015.
Tableau serves several industries including banking, communications, education, federal and state governments, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, retail, and sports. Tableau solutions are used for big data, dashboards, finance, IT management, social media, supply chain, and website analytics.
Actionable Insights
At the end of May 2017, Tableau released Tableau 10.3, a data-driven upgrade for Tableau products. Its analytic solutions lineup includes Tableau Desktop, Server, and Online.
Tableau Desktop is an analytics software solution with features that enable businesses to quickly receive actionable insights, connect to more data, answer deeper questions, and put more data on the map. It creates data visualizations and includes interactive dashboards with hundreds of data sources.
The Tableau Server shares dashboards and data to find answers in minutes. It keeps data secure on customer’s servers and is compatible with Tableau Mobile for data on the go. Users may publish shared data models to Tableau Server for shared accessibility.
Tableau Online is an analytic platform fully hosted in the cloud. It skips the hardware setup as a hosted Tableau Server and publishes dashboards accessible on a browser or on a Tableau mobile application. Because it is a fully hosted solution, Tableau Online requires no server configurations, software upgrades, or scale hardware capacity.
Tableau 10.3 was released to take collaboration one step further with improved web authoring, mobile updates, and data driven alerts. Current Tableau customers can immediately upgrade their software versions while new customers can purchase a subscription to Tableau Desktop. Dustin Smith, market intelligence manager, Tableau, says Tableau Desktop starts at just $35 per month with annual billing.
One of the newest features Tableau 10.3 brings to the table is data-driven alerts for Tableau Server including management flexibility. It allows customers to instantly receive notifications as their data crosses a preset threshold. Customers may set alerts by pointing at the data they would like to be notified of. Users can automatically receive outliers on customer orders, sales, and production data.
“Our 10.3 release is another big step in our on-going commitment to our customers to provide the best-of-breed modern analytics platform,” comments Smith.
Tableau 10.3 includes features for innovative advancements in the analytics space, including smart table and join recommendations that utilize machine learning to help people discover already available data models. Smith says smart table and join recommendations drastically reduce the time to insight while also helping IT organizations guarantee a single source of analytical truth for their companies.
Smart Analytics
Tableau addresses data and analytics concerns by monitoring its platforms and honoring its ongoing commitment. “Our development team is constantly working on new updates to the platform to better serve our customers,” says Smith.
The upgraded software is not targeted to a specific industry because it is flexible enough to meet the needs of several. According to Smith, “Tableau 10.3 is targeted at every industry where people are interested in faster, smarter data analysis.”
He believes any industry that relies heavily on PDF documents will greatly benefit from Tableau 10.3’s new PDF connection. For example, industries like public sector organizations must analyze documents on Data.gov or other repositories. The PDF connector allows users to directly import PDF tables into Tableau with one click.
The upgrade also comes with new connectors to data sources like Amazon Athena, ServiceNow, MongoDB, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive. The upgrade strengthens the Tableau portfolio by adding new solutions for users to find the right data for analytics.
“Tableau 10.3 introduces our very first smart analytics feature, a recommendation engine for tables and joins, which we believe is the next phase of data analytics in companies,” explains Smith. The smart analytics feature accompanied with additional connectors and a data driven alerting functionality allows more organizations to be smarter and faster in their approach to analytics at all levels.
The recommendation engine helps users to save time by quickly identifying database tables relevant to the user’s analysis. Customers can now automatically apply insights from experts and other users across their organization.
Harnessing Data
The release of Tableau 10.3 makes it easier for Tableau users to stay engaged with the metrics that matter most. It allows users to instantly receive notifications with new data driven alerts and simplifies analyzing data with smart table and join recommendations. As Smith notes, Tableau 10.3 reduces time to insight and helps IT organizations guarantee a single source of analytical truth.
July2017, Software Magazine
