Tableau has opened its wallet for only the third time in its history to acquire ClearGraph.
The data visualisation firm, which was founded in 2003, is said to be acquiring ClearGraph to help boost its natural language query technology.
The reason why ClearGraph’s technology could help with this is because it has developed: “proprietary semantic search platform uses context awareness and natural language processing to intelligently interpret and answer English language queries,
making finding and understanding enterprise data as easy as search,” according to the company’s bio.
“We are thrilled to bring the ClearGraph team to Tableau to enable people to ask questions of their data using natural language,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau.
“Natural language queries will make it easier for more people to interact with Tableau, whether you’re an executive who needs an answer quickly, or on a mobile phone and want an answer from your data on the move. We’re excited about this acquisition as the ClearGraph team shares our mission and is aligned with our innovation perspectives on conversational analytics.”
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Tableau has always made a play for ease of use, designing its software to be used by all kinds of business users, not just data scientists, in order to help them get to grips with the data they use on a daily basis.
“We founded ClearGraph because we saw a need to bridge the gap between humans and computers through natural language, especially when it comes to exploring data,” said Andrew Vigneault, CEO of ClearGraph. “Tableau is a natural fit for us because we have similar missions, cultures and genuine desire to help more people around the world access, interact with and get answers from their data.”
No financial details of the acquisition have been revealed, but the employees will move to Tableau’s offices and the data visualisation company will set about integrating ClearGraph’s tech into its own.
