Tableau Archives

The Covid-19 pandemic was undoubtedly good to Salesforce. As businesses around the world were forced to move their operations online at unprecedented speed in 2020, demand for its cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tools rocketed, and revenues soared accordingly. Data analytics and business intelligence platform Tableau faces an uncertain future. (Photo by T. Schneider/Shutterstock) Fast forward three years and things aren't looking quite so rosy. "Customers are taking a more measured approached to purchasing decisions," lamented Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff as he announced plans to lay off 7,000 staff at the start of January in the face of the economic headwinds that have buffeted the tech industry. "As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people," he said. As Salesforce's income shrinks, Benioff is also facing pressure from shareholders eager for a return on their investment. His strategy for the business has prioritised growth over dividends, with more than $50bn invested in the acquisitions of companies including enterprise messaging platform Slack and business intelligence software developer Tableau. The latter is set to bear the brunt of the upcoming Salesforce job cuts, with Bloomberg reporting earlier this month that many of Tableau's senior staff have already followed CEO Mark Nelson out of the door. Faced with a leadership vacuum, and a highly competitive marketplace, Tableau, the long-time market leader in BI software, is staring at an uncertain future. Greater integration with Salesforce seems inevitable, but could come at the cost of its status as a standalone product. Salesforce and Tableau: a mutually beneficial partnership Tableau was founded in 2003 and provides data visualisation tools which help organisations understand and analyse their business data. Customers include the NHS, for which the company provided data dashboards during the pandemic, as well as business big names such as Verizon, ABB and SwissRe. The company was acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for $15.7bn. "Tableau is an extraordinary company, with an amazing product and team and an incredibly passionate community," Benioff said at the time. "Together we can transform the way people understand not only their customers, but their whole world - delivering powerful AI-driven insights across all types of data and use cases for people of every skill level." It's hard to judge how successful the deal has been in financial terms for Salesforce, as the company does not break out individual revenue for Tableau in its financial reports. Its 2022 full-year results show that its revenue from its data division, which includes Tableau and its other analytics functions as well as its integration products, was $3.7bn, up from $2.9bn the year before. Tableau's last reported revenue as an independent business was $1.2bn, in 2018. But joining forces was a sensible move at the time, says Rena Bhattacharyya, service director of enterprise technology and services at GlobalData. "It was a good acquisition for both parties," she says. "For Tableau, it brought it the potential to have access to an enormous user base. So many organisations use Salesforce internally, and the opportunity to try and push them the additional solutions that Tableau brings to the table was a good one - and provided an opportunity for Tableau and a way for it to differentiate itself from its competitors." For Salesforce, Bhattacharyya says the purchase gave it "the analytics capabilities that it really needed to offer its clients to get to the next level". She adds: "I think it was a good deal and nothing that has happened recently changes that." Tableau vs Power BI In the business intelligence market, Tableau faces fierce competition from Microsoft's Power BI suite of tools. Data collected by enterprise IT buying platform TrustRadius in 2021 showed that MSFT's product had a 36% market share, compared to Tableau's 20%. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

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