| Company | Tableau Software |
| Address | 837 North 34th Street Suite 400 Seattle – USA |
| Founders | Christian Chabot, Dr. Chris Stolte, Dr. Pat Hanrahan |
| Founded | January 2003 |
| Funding | IPO |
| Employees | 700 |
| Website | www.tableausoftware.com |
| Rating | 8 bits |
Tableau Software provides easy-to-use software applications for fast analytics and visualization. Their goal is to help people see and understand data. In 2011 they were ranked by Gartner as the world’s fastest growing business intelligence company.
They offer three solutions for different target groups:
Tableau Desktop for everyone who wants to drag and drop data to analyse it;
Tableau Server for organisations who want to combine all data into interactive dashboards;
Tableau Public for public websites who want to tell stories with visualized data;
Tableau was founded with the idea that pictures work better than numbers and that databases should therefore produce powerful visual graphs. Chris Stolte and Pat Hanrahan developed the interactive data visualization software at Stanford University. The software of Tableau simply builds charts, graphs interactive maps and other kinds of data visualizations that are easy to read and understand by its customers. Tableau was only built for structured data (data in rows and columns) and not for unstructured data as some of the other data startups discussed here.
The best feature Tableau is that users can use the software without any IT training but with simple commons sense. Users can drag and drop their data into the application and the system does the rest. The system can even suggest graphs based on analysing the available data.
At the moment a lot of companies from around the world have used Tableau products. In 2011 in generated revenue of $ 37 million and in the first half of 2012 this was already $ 58.7 million. At the moment they have about 10.000 paying customers.
Tableau Software is a rising star and doing very well at the moment. It has proven that there is a huge demand for easy to use big data visualizers and since they have created links with Hadoop in 2012 this will only grow stronger. With at least one patent and at the moment 39 awards, Tableau Software is definitely a company on its way to a lot of success. Therefore, BigData-startups.com gives Tableau Software a rating of 8 bits.
Update: On May 17 Tableau Software rang the bell at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange as the newest NYSE member, trading under the symbol DATA. It priced its IPO at $31 per share and as such raised some $254.2 million. A total of 5,000,000 shares were offered by Tableau Software, and a total of 3,200,000 shares were offered by certain selling stockholders. You can find the press release here.