What Data Analysts Expect after Tableau $15.7B Acquisition by Salesforce

There is lots of evidence showing the importance of data management and visualization for businesses growth and competitiveness in the modern data-driven world. In June 2019, such importance was shown very clearly even for those who are very far from data science by two multi-billion acquisitions of leaders in the business intelligence industry- Looker (bought by Google on June 6 for $2.6B) and Tableau (bought by Salesforce on June 10, just a weekend after, for astonishing $15.7B).

The second acquisition is especially remarkable not only because of its huge 11-digit amount, which is the biggest in Salesforce history – more than double the $6.5B Salesforce paid for MuleSoft last year. It is also about 5 times more than what Google just paid for Looker, but also because of its huge 42% premium over Tableau’s market value of $10.8 billion as of the previous stock market close.

Salesforce is a leading cloud-based CRM platform and a suite of enterprise applications for customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. Tableau is a popular data analysis and visualization tool with a low-code interface to easily generate a wide range of attractive visualizations and interactive dashboards – it is simplifying raw data into easily understandable formats. It has a large network of evangelists, there is also plenty of free resources and tutorials for many niche use cases. So both these tools together is a really good fit.

Since the announcement, many expectations and concerns regarding this deal have spread throughout the business intelligence community, based on the experience of previous Salesforce acquisitions. Panoply has provided the integration between Salesforce data and Tableau visualizations for a long time already via our smart data warehouse, so we decided to analyze these questions more details in this article.

How the acquisition can influence customers?

The key question is how Salesforce plans to make a profit to offset such huge investments – all other questions people are asking in the context of this acquisition are actually related to it.

Immediately after the announcement, many Salesforce users began to share experiences related to the use of Salesforce products in their companies, mentioning concerns that they are too expensive, not quite user-friendly, and criticizing Salesforce practices in selling their products and retaining users.

Tableau development

Most Tableau users fear that integration with Salesforce will also slow down its development because now all the resources will be directed not at developing more advanced visualization capabilities, but the embedding this product into the existing Salesforce ecosystem (including adaptation to their management and marketing models). so that time spent integrating into SalesForce and on SalesForce rationalizing their products may have even more negative impact on the future of Tableau.
There is also a concern that Tableau will not be as neutral as before the acquisition and Salesforce will slow down its integrations with its key competitors.

If we look at the discussion of this news in the /r/BusinessIntelligence Reddit community, it is seen that the most upvoted comments are not about some technical details, but previous negative experience on two such acquisitions – on how SAP bought Business Objects and stopped new feature development for years and Cognos management and development issues after their acquisition by IBM while they were trying to update their UI to chase Tableau. Thus BI community are most worried that Tableau may face nearly the same perspective in the future.

Many people consider the acquisition also a way to cross-sell Salesforce products and even forcibly offer their services to existing Tableau users considering the future of the product development might go towards integrating them and discontinuing Tableau as a standalone option at some point. This is, actually, the greatest Tableau users concern in the discussion on this news in the /r/Tableau/ community.

Some redditors consider Salesforce is a hard vendor to work with, mentioning such issues like account managers trying to sell you product your business don’t really need, new sales reps each half a year to sell you the same products you didn’t buy from your last rep, automatic price increases they try and push out every year.

Many of them are also concerned that Tableau prices will be going up very soon. The competition with Microsoft Power BI is considered as the main deterrent for this – some people already shared such experiences of their companies, based only on how affordable Power BI pricing policy is vs Tableau (especially for Microsoft cloud tools users).

At the same time, Tableau gets easier access to a lot of enterprise accounts now, so Salesforce is thinking bigger and has some plans for them. For example, they can sell some pre-built sales visualization bundles to boost Tableau value proposition, considering also already existing Salesforce integrations with other tools. It would be really interesting to find out how Salesforce offerings will change, and how the tools bundle together.

It seems like Salesforce is directly targeting customer data platforms (CDP) niche with this acquisition. Tableau will also be integrated Salesforce’s Customer 360 to unify cross-channel customer experiences. Their CRM platform generates massive amounts of data, so having Tableau surely be beneficial for this area especially considering their domain knowledge.

Einstein Analytics perspectives

Salesforce announced they would provide more details about their product integration plans after the deal closes, but it is clear that Tableau and Salesforce Einstein Analytics (formerly known as Wave) mostly duplicate each other. EA had a good perspective on the market but it has not reached its adoption significantly beyond the Salesforce data into broader use cases.

This fact will probably cause confusion how long these two platforms will remain completely separate and how they will be combined in the future.

It is unlikely to expect dramatic changes in Tableau in the short term because many of its customers are still only partially in the cloud. But, in the long term, it allows Salesforce to create more data visualization aligned to their Customer360 integrations.

This news is also likely to torpedo future EA sales – a significant part of Salesforce marketing strategy related to this product are based on the fact that it was integrated. Now it’s going to be pretty confusing for customers – Salesforce will probably run Tableau and EA as separate offerings, it would be really difficult to explain the difference between the two considering unclear future EA perspectives. So, while waiting for the Tableau integration, many potential customers will postpone their purchases, because Tableau is much more user-friendly for non-IT users. And they will be afraid what Salesforce will discontinue EA at some point. Many Salesforce customers also expect to see more user-friendly interface for their cloud analytics.

BI job market

Salesforce’s purchase suggests that they’ll be integrating the Tableau into their SFDC platform, which should open up new opportunities and positions for integrators, analysts, and experts.

This acquisition can result in some layoffs in the Tableau teams, and maybe that will result in some new tools being created by the Tableau experts who otherwise would be working under Tableau.

When larger companies making these sorts of acquisitions it is great for experts working with their product and more opportunity for technical advancement on both platforms. It validates Tableau experts skillset and expertise and tells their employers that analytics is a really important thing helping make better decisions through streamlined analytical capabilities. It also validates investment of skills into such BI tools, with more companies presumably investing in Tableau via their Salesforce experience, so there should be more work available in this area for Tableau experts. Considering Salesforce footprint we will also probably see many mid-sized companies moving towards Tableau over the other BI tools since businesses often prefer centralization of their IT tools.

The possible need to pay more for Tableau if price increase and an expected slowdown in its integration with Salesforce competitors could be a good reminder to keep your skills with other tools also to ensure that your data can be viewed via different tools.

How Salesforce’ Tableau can catch up with Microsoft’ Power BI after the acquisition?

Tableau and Power BI are among the top visualization tools. Tableau is a fantastic BI tool for almost any company that can really take their gorgeous visualizations with large data sets for a spin – Tableau setup is especially easy for SMEs with a simple data ecosystem, and if you have more complexity they offer significantly tailored onboarding solutions.

But there are many things to love about their competitor from Microsoft – Power BI. Microsoft is always expanding their integrations, and the resources of such a huge company means you’ll have access to the most robust technology in the future. For example, all of Power BI’s charts play nicely when showcasing printed reports with Word and PowerPoint.

‘When Power BI was released, both tools were fairly comparable. But, nowadays, many BI experts who worked with both tools think that Tableau lost the race to Power BI in a recent couple of years, because they could not keep pace with the stream of Power BI features and updates from Microsoft. Power BI coming out with new features every single month, while Tableau seems to be the same product for many users. The thing that Power BI is still lacking vs Tableau is visual customization (especially geospatial integration).

Present

Tableau is generally a reporting tool where you create a dataset for a single report with a limited built-in ETL which usually needs external tools like Alteryx or Talend. It excels at executive-level reports, mostly due to performance issues at the 10-20M row mark and better visualizations and UX.

Power BI is a data modeling tool where you create a dataset for the data model which provides more advanced development process together with Power Query. It provides strong automation and integration with the Azure ecosystem and excels at operational low-level reports.and, generally, provides better performance for really big datasets with 100M -200M rows.

There’s pretty much parity between the two products. A novice could found Tableau to be more intuitive to just attach to files and databases. But it can’t be automated as easily, so a business needs a Tableau trained person on-site for each new presentation. Overall, If you look at the entire platform, such things like ETL, connectivity, sharing, integration with MS products, etc. put Power BI in a better position mid-long term. Also, Power BI is much cheaper, especially for Office 365 Enterprise subscribers (where it is already included in some plans) – Combining such tools like Power BI, Flow, SharePoint, PBI, and APIs provides a secure workflow tool with ETL and visualization capabilities within the cost of their subscription. In many cases, Microsoft tools purchased because of an existing implementation, acquaintance with the ecosystem and technical support. For many small businesses, it would be a radical improvement over their legacy Excel/PDF reporting. Power BI also eliminates costly licenses for tools such as Alteryx.

Future

It is this Salesforce competition with Microsoft should be the most important factor which will prevent Tableau pricing from rising after the acquisition. It is even would also be logical for Salesforce to bundle Tableau in their premium plans. It is because many businesses already keep siding with Power BI from Tableau last years simply based on price, despite having Tableau visualization implemented in many use cases for a long time.

At the enterprise level, some users think it is much safer to be integrated with MS than Salesforce, they point out some concerns regarding Salesforce licensing policies and trying to own customer data to their ecosystem.

The hardest part of getting away from Tableau with its visualization-focused design principles to Power BI may be its way of thinking about data, because the measures in Power BI are abstract (just formulate as a parameter should be calculated) and not connected directly to the visualizations – Power BI query editor not only feels superior to Tableau prep, but it also works in a completely different way.