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.
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.