Tableau Software
Revolutionizing Data Visualization and Analysis

Data and its analysis has become the secret harpoon of success for any enterprise today. The world has seen an exponential rise in abstract dataflow from untapped, unstructured sources such as imagery, social media channels, news feeds, emails, journals, blogs, images, sounds, and videos. In order to stay ahead in the market, organizations need to harness this data, analyze it, and turn into actionable insights. They also must be able to work with data, draw well-reasoned inferences from it, and effectively communicate their discoveries to broader audiences in order to thrive in this environment. In the early 21st century, organizations lacked the ability to use data effectively. What held them from becoming true data-driven businesses was absence of data analytics skills among employees. Recognizing this ever-growing challenge, Chris Stolte, Pat Hanrahan, and Christian Chabot from Stanford University started Tableau Software in 2003 with a visionary idea and pioneered the concept of ‘visual analytics’. They developed a simple and user friendly tool, Tableau that revolutionized the way people use data today. Tableau has built a visual language which lets people interact, navigate, explore, discover, and be curious with data naturally. Through Tableau, businesses can connect to the data that they require, be it a spreadsheet, database or big data. With the help of Tableau, businesses can also access data warehouses, cloud applications, and cloud data bases and easily combine data from multiple sources in few clicks. Tableau brings the data of businesses together in one simple view.

The software not only helps organizations to create graphs, charts, maps, reports but also assists them in the next-gen concepts like predictive and prescriptive analysis. Tableau is backed with VizQL language which makes it flexible to pull data from any source. It facilitates the user with ‘n’ number of visualization tools to customize the report. Another innovative technology for data analysis developed by Tableau Software is Data Engine. With the use of this Tableau technology, businesses can analyze millions of data rows in seconds without custom programming scenarios of the analysis. In 2016, Tableau unveiled its next generation in-memory data engine based on the Hyper technology. The recently launched Hyper data engine provides interactive analysis on data of all sizes while enabling fast data ingestion for near real-time analysis.

Starting from a small office in Seattle, today Tableau has spread its wings across the world. It has offices in U.S., UK, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and China. The users of Tableau Software range from large corporations to sole proprietors. Some of the top companies which are transforming their business and seeing dramatic results with Tableau belong to Automotive, Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing, Media and Entertainment, Business Service, Communications, and Education sectors. While facing competition with the leading business intelligence companies like IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, Tableau has managed to obtain a unique position in the market. Although initially the software was not accepted by the IT professionals, it has now strived to emerge in the era when the leading BI companies are already enjoying their success. Since the launch of its first initial public offering in 2013, raising 250 million dollars, the company has never looked back. In the past seven years, Tableau has seen a tremendous growth of 82 percent in its sales. In the near future, the company has plans to extend its products into data preparation and improving in-memory data processing. Further, they envision including data-audit capabilities, introducing ‘instant analytics,’ delivering natural-language processing (NLP) query capability, and offering threshold-based notification-triggering.