Visualization with Tableau
Andrei Pandre
Discover, Analyze, Explore, Pivot, Drilldown, Visualize your data with Tableau
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Visualization with Tableau
Data to the People: tb8.1 vs qv11.2 vs sf5.5

After announcement of Tableau 8.1 ( and completion of TCC13) this week people asked me to refresh my comparison of leading Data Visualization tools and I felt it is the good time to do it, because finally Tableau can claim it has 64-bit platform and it is able now to do more advanced Analytics, thanks to Integration with R (both new features needs to be benchmarked and tested, but until my benchmarks are completed I tend to believe to Tableau’s claims). I actually felt that Tableau may be leapfrogged the competition and now Qlikview and Spotfire have to do something about it (of course if they care).

I enjoyed this week Tableau’s pun/wordplay/slogan “Data to the People” it reminds, of course, other slogan “Power to the People” but also indirectly refers to NYSE Symbol “DATA” which is the SYMBOL of Tableau Software Inc. and it means (indirectly): “Tableau to the People”:

In fact the “keynote propaganda” from Christian Chabot and Chris Stolte was so close to what I am saying for years on this blog, that I used their slogan FEBA4A (“Fast, Easy, Beautiful, Anywhere for Anyone”) as the filter to include or remove from comparison any runner-ups, traditional, me-too and losing tools and vendors.

For example despite the huge recent progress Microsoft did with its BI Stack (updates in Office 2013, 365 and SQL 2012/14 of Power Pivot/View/Map/Query, SSAS, Data Explorer, Polybase, Azure Services, StreamInsight, in-Memory OLTP, Columnstore Indexing etc.) did not prevent me from removal of Microsoft’s BI Stack from comparison (MSFT still trying to sell Data Visualization as a set of add-ins to Excel and SQL Server as oppose to separate product), because it it is not FEBA4A.

For similar reasons I did not include runner-ups like Omniscope, Advizor, Panopticon (it is part of Datawatch now), Panorama, traditional BI vendors, like IBM, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Microstrategy and many me-too vendors like Actuate, Pentaho, Information Builders, Jaspersoft, Jedox, Yellowfin, Bime and dozens of others. I even was able finally to rule out wonderful toolkits like D3 (because they are not for “anyone” and they require brilliant people like Mike Bostock to shine).

I was glad to see similar thinking from Tableau’s CEO in his yesterday’s interview here: http://news.investors.com/091213-670803-tableau-takes-on-big-rivals-oracle-sap-ibm-microsoft.htm?p=full and I quote:

“The current generation of technology that companies and governments use to try to see and understand the data they store in their databases and spreadsheets is without exception complicated, development-intensive, staff-intensive, inflexible, slow-moving and expensive. And every one of those adjectives is true for each of the market-share leaders in our industry.”

Here is my brief and extremely personal (yes, opinionated but not bias) comparison of 3 leading Data Visualization (DV Comparison) platforms (if you cannot see in your browser, see screenshot below of Google Doc:

I did not add pricing to comparison, because I cannot find enough public info about it. This is all I have:

https://tableau.secure.force.com/webstore

http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/pricing

https://silverspotfire.tibco.com/us/get-spotfire/silver-spotfire-feature-matrix

additional pricing info for Tableau Server Core Licensing: “8 core server (enough to support 1,000 users, or 100 concurrent) for Tableau is $180k first year, about $34k every year after year 1 for maintenance”. With 8 core licensing I actually witnessed support for more then 1000 users: 1300+ active interactors, 250+ Publishers, 3000+ Viewers. I also witnessed (2+ years ago, since then price grew!) more than once that negotiation with Tableau Sales can get you down to $160K for 8 Core license with 20% every year after year 1 for maintenance (so in 2010-2011 total price was about $192K with 1 year maintenance)

Also one of visitors indicated to me that current pricing for 8 core Tableau 8.0 license for 1st year is $240K now plus (mandatory?) 20-25% maintenance for 1st year… However negotiations are very possible and can save you up to 20-25% of “discount”. I am aware of recent cases where 8-core license was sold (after discount) for around $195K with maintenance for 1st year for about $45K so total sale was $240K with 1st year maintenance (25% growth in price for last 3 years).

Below is a screenshot of above comparison, because some browsers (e.g. Safari or Firefox before version 24) cannot see either Google Doc embedded into WordPress or Google Doc itself:

Please note that I did not quantify above which of 3 tools are better, it is not possible until I will repeat all benchmarks and tests (I did many of those in the past; if I will have time in the future, I can do it again) when actual Tableau 8.1 will be released (see latest here: https://licensing.tableausoftware.com/esdalt/ ). However I used above the green color for good and red color for bad (light-colored backgrounds in 3 middle columns indicated good/bad). Also keep in mind that Qliktech and TIBCO may release something new soon enough (say Qlikview 12 or they called it now Qlikview.Next and Spotfire 6), so leapfrogging game may continue.

Update 10/11/13: interesting article about Tableau (in context with Qlikview and Spotfire) by Akram Annous from SeekeingAlpha: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1738252-tableau-a-perfect-short-with-a-catalyst-to-boot . Akram is very active visitor to my blog, especially to this article above. This article only 1 month old but already needs updates due recent pre-announcements about Qlikview.Next (Qlikview 12) and Spotfire 6, which as I predicted showing that leapfrogging game continue at full speed. Akram is brave enough by “targeting” pricing for DATA shares as $55 IN 30 DAYS, $35 IN 6 MONTHS. I am not convinced yet.

if you will see the AD below, it is not me, it is wordpress.com…

Tableau 8.1 announced, 8.2 to follow

Today Tableau Customer Conference 2013 started with 3200+ attendees from 40+ countries and 100+ industries, with 700 employees of Tableau, 240 sessions. Tableau 8.1 pre-announced today for release in fall of 2013, also version 8.2 planned for winter 2014, and Tableau 9.0 for later in 2014.

Update 9/10/13: keynote now is available recorded and online: http://www.tableausoftware.com/keynote

(Recorded Monday Sept 9, 2013 Christian Chabot, Chris Stolte and the developers LIVE)

New in 8.1: 64-bit, Integration with R, support for SAML, IPV6 and External Load Balancers, Copy/Paste Dashboards and worksheets between workbooks, new Calendar Control, own visual style, including customizing even filters, Tukey’s Box-and-Whisker Box-plot, prediction bands, ranking, visual analytics for everyone and everywhere (in the cloud now)

Planned and new for 8.2: Tableau for MAC, Story Points (new type of worksheet/dashboard with mini-slides as story-points), seamless access to data via data connection interface to visually build a data schema, including inner/left/right/outer visual joins, beautifying columns names, easier metadata etc, Web authoring enhancements (it may get into 8.1: moving quick filters, improvement for Tablets, color encoding.) etc.

8.1: Francois Ajenstat announced: 64-bit finally (I asked for that for many years) for server processes and for Desktop, support for SAML (single-sign-ON on Server and Desktop), IPV6, External Load Balancers:

8.1: Dave Lion announced R integration with Tableau:

8.1: Mike Arvold announced “Visual Analytics for everyone”, including implemention of famous Tukey’s Box-and-Whisker Box-plot, better forecasting, prediction bands, ranking, better heatmaps:

8.1: Melinda Minch announced “fast, easy, beautiful”, most importantly copy/paste dashboards and worksheets between workbooks, customizing everything, including quick filters, new calendar control, own visual style, folders in Data Window etc…

8.2: Jason King pre-announced the Seamless access to data via data connection interface to visually build a data schema, including inner/left/right/outer “visual” joins, beautifying columns names, default formats, new functions like DATEPARSE, appending data-set with new tables, beautifying columns names, easier metadata etc.

8.2: Robert Kosara introduced Story Points (using new type of worksheet/dashboard with mini-slides as story-points) for new Storytelling functionality:

8.2: Andrew Beers pre-announced Tableau 8.2 on MAC and he got a very warm reception from audience for that:

Chris Stolte proudly mentioned his 275-strong development team, pre-announced upcoming Tableau Releases 8.1 (this fall), 8.2 (winter 2014) and 9.0 (later in 2014) and introduced 7 “developers” who (see above Francois, Mike, Dave, Melinda, Jason, Robert and Andrew) discussed during this keynote new features (feature list is definitely longer and wider that recent “innovations” we saw from Qlikview 11.2 and even from Spotfire 5.5):

Christian Chabot opening keynote today… He said something important: current BI Platforms are not fast, nor easy, they are not beautiful and not for anyone and they are definitely not “anywhere” but only in designated places with appropriate IT personnel (compare with Tableau Public, Tableau Online, Tableau free Reader etc.) and it is only capable to produce a bunch of change requests from one Enterprise’s department to another, which will take long time to implement with any SDLC framework.

Christian basically repeated what I am saying on this blog for many years, check it here http://apandre.wordpress.com/market/competitors/ : traditional BI software (from SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microstrategy and even Microsoft cannot compete with Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire) is obsolete and dying and this is very direct challenge and threat to BI vendors (I am not sure if they understand that): your (BI that is) time is over and now it is time for Tableau (also for Qlikview and Spotfire but they are slightly behind now…).

Summer Readings from my Google+ Page

While blog preserving my observations and thoughts, it preventing me to spend enough time to read what other people thinking and saying, so I created almost 2 years ago the extension of this blog in the form of 2 Google+ pages http://tinyurl.com/VisibleData and http://tinyurl.com/VisualizationWithTableau , where I accumulated all reading pointers for myself and gradually reading those materials when I have time.

Those 2 pages magically became extremely popular (this is unintended result) with total more than 5000 Google+ followers as of today. For example here is a Chart showing monthly growth of the number of followers for the main extension of this blog http://tinyurl.com/VisibleData :

So please see below some samples of Reading Pointers accumulated over last 3 months of summer by my Google+ pages:

Author trying to simplify BigData Definition as following: “BigData Simplified: Too much data to fit into a single server”: http://yottascale.com/entry/the-colorful-secrets-of-bigdata-platforms

Recent talk from Donald Farmer: http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/06/touch-the-next-frontier-of-business-intelligence/

Dmitry pointing to implementation Disaster of Direct Discovery in Qlikview 11.2: http://bi-review.blogspot.com/2013/04/first-look-at-qlikview-direct-discovery.html

Specs for Tableau in Cloud: https://www.tableausoftware.com/products/online/specs

The DB-Engines Monthly Ranking ranks database management systems according to their popularity. Turned out that only 3 DBMSes are popular: Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL:

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend

According to Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs, three main skills of data scientist are the same 3 skills I tried to find when hiring programmers for my teams 5, 10, 20 and more years ago: 1. Problem-Solving Skills. 2. Communications Skills. 3. Open-Mindedness. This makes all my hires for last 20+ years Data Scientists, right? See it here: http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/3-key-skills-of-successful-data-scientis/240159803

A study finds the odds of rising to another income level are notably low in certain cities, like Atlanta and Charlotte, and much higher in New York and Boston: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html

Tableau is a prototyping tool: http://tableaufriction.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-once-and-future-prototyping-tool-of.html

Why More Data and Simple Algorithms Beat Complex Analytics Models: http://data-informed.com/why-more-data-and-simple-algorithms-beat-complex-analytics-models/

New Census Bureau Interactive Map Shows Languages Spoken in America: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/education/cb13-143.html

Google silently open sourced a tool called word2vec, prepackaged deep-learning software designed to understand the relationships between words with no human guidance. It actually similar to known for a decade methods called PLSI and PLSA:

http://gigaom.com/2013/08/16/were-on-the-cusp-of-deep-learning-for-the-masses-you-can-thank-google-later/

https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/

“Money is not the only reward of education, yet it is surely the primary selling point used to market data science programs, and the primary motivator for students. But there’s no clear definition of data science and no clear understanding of what knowledge employers are willing to pay for, or how much they will pay, now or in the future. Already I know many competent, diligent data analysts who are unemployed or underemployed. So, I am highly skeptical that the students who will invest their time and money in data science programs will reap the rewards they have been led to expect.”: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2013/08/19/data-science-whats-the-half-life-of-a-buzzword/

Some good blog-posts from InterWorks:

https://www.interworks.com/blogs/mfowler/2013/08/16/aggregating-extracts-%E2%80%93-why-and-how-would-i-do-such-thing

http://www.interworks.com/blogs/tspaulding/2013/08/07/understanding-layout-containers-tableau

Technique for using Tableau data blending to create a dynamic, data-driven “parameter”: http://drawingwithnumbers.artisart.org/creating-a-dynamic-parameter-with-a-tableau-data-blend/

More about Colors:

http://blog.visual.ly/subtleties-of-color/

http://blog.visual.ly/subtleties-of-color-connecting-color-to-meaning/

http://blog.visual.ly/subtleties-of-color-different-types-of-data-require-different-color-schemes/

http://interworks.co.uk/tableau/using-custom-colour-palettes/

http://community.qlikview.com/blogs/qlikviewdesignblog/2013/08/16/color-codes

Russian Postcodes are collected and partially visualized:

http://tableaumapping.bi/2013/08/23/russia-postcodes/

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/RussiaPolygons/RussiaPostcodes?:embed=y&:display_count=no

http://acuitybusiness.com/blog/bid/175066/Three-Reasons-Why-Companies-Should-Outlaw-Excel

EXASolution claims to be up to 1000 times faster than traditional databases and the fastest database in the world – based on in memory computing.

http://www.exasol.com/en/exasolution/technical-details.html

web interest to Tableau and Qlikview:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=qlikview%2C+tableau%2C+spotfire%2C+microstrategy#q=tableau%2C%20microstrategy%2C%20qlikview%2C%20spotfire&geo=US&date=9%2F2008%2061m&cmpt=q

Free rows from Market Capitalization DV Leader

Google+

Last week Tableau increased by 10-fold the capacity of Data Visualizations published with Tableau Public to a cool 1 Million rows of Data, basically to the same amount of rows, which Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013 (often used as data sources for Tableau Public) can handle these days and increased by 20-fold the storage capacity (to 1GB of free storage) of each free Tableau Public Account, see it here:

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/08/one-million-rows-2072

It means that free Tableau Public Account will have the storage twice larger than Spotfire Silver’s the most expensive Analyst Account (that one will cost you $4500/year). Tableau said: “Consider it a gift from us to you.”. I have to admit that even kids in this country know that there is nothing free here, so please kid me not – we are all witnessing of some kind of investment here – this type of investment worked brilliantly in the past… And all users of Tableau Public are investing too – with their time and learning efforts.

And this is not all: “For customers of Tableau Public Premium, which allows users to save locally and disable download of their workbooks, the limits have been increased to 10 million rows of data at 10GB of storage space” see it here:

http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/press-releases/2013/tableau-software-extends-tableau-public-1-million-rows-data without changing the price of service (of course in Tableau Public Premium price is not fixed and depends on the number of impressions).

Out of 100+ millions of Tableau users only 40000 qualified to be called Tableau Authors, see it here http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/press-releases/2013/tableau-software-launches-tableau-public-author-profiles so they are consuming Tableau Public’s Storage more actively then others. As an example you can see my Tableau’s Author Profile here: http://public.tableausoftware.com/profile/andrei5435#/ .

I will assume those Authors will consume 40000GB of online storage, which will cost to Tableau Software less then (my guess, I am open to correction from blog visitors) $20K/year just for the storage part of Tableau Public Service.

During the last week the other important announcement on 8/8/13 – Quarterly Revenue – came from Tableau: it reported the Q2 revenue of $49.9 million, up 71% year-over-year: http://investors.tableausoftware.com/investor-news/investor-news-details/2013/Tableau-Announces-Second-Quarter-2013-Financial-Results/default.aspx .

Please note that 71% is extremely good YoY growth compare with the entire anemic “BI industry”, but less then 100% YoY which Tableau grew in its private past.

All these announcements above happened simultaneously with some magical (I have no theory why this happened; one weak theory is the investors madness and over-excitement about Q2 revenue of $49.9M announced on 8/8/13?) and sudden increase of the nominal price of Tableau Stock (under the DATA name on NYSE) from $56 (which is already high) on August 1st 2013 (announcement of 1 millions of rows/1GB storage for Tableau public Accounts) to $72+ today:

It means that the Market Capitalization of Tableau Software may be approaching $4B and sales may be $200M/year. For comparison, Tableau’s direct and more mature competitor Qliktech has now the Capitalization below $3B while its sales approaching almost $500M/year. From Market Capitalization point of view in 3 moths Tableau went from a private company to the largest Data Visualization publicly-traded software company on market!

Tableau Server is in the Cloud

Competition in Data Visualization market is not only on features, market share and mindshare but also on pricing and lisensing. For example the Qlikview licensing and pricing is public for a while here: http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/pricing and Spotfire Silver pricing public for a while too: https://silverspotfire.tibco.com/us/silver-spotfire-version-comparison .

Tableau Desktop has 3 editions: Public (Free), Personal ($999) and Professional ($1999), see it here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison ; in addition you can have full Desktop (read-only) experience with free Tableau Reader (neither Qlikview nor Spotfire have free readers for server-less, unlimited distribution of Visualizations, which is making Tableau a mind-share leader right away…)

The release of Tableau Server online hosting this month: http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/press-releases/2013/tableau-unveils-cloud-business-intelligence-product-tableau-online heated the licensing competition and may force the large changes in licencing landscape for Data Visualization vendors. Tableau Server existed in the cloud for a while with tremendous success as Tableau Public (free) and Tableau Public Premium (former Tableau Digital with its weird pricing based on “impressions”).

But Tableau Online is much more disruptive for BI market: for $500/year you can get the complete Tableau Server site (administered by you!) in the cloud with (initially) 25 (it can grow) authenticated by you users and 100GB of cloud storage for your visualizations, which is 200 times more then you can get for $4500/year top-of-the line Spotfire Silver “Analyst account”. This Tableau Server site will be managed in the cloud by Tableau Software own experts and require nor IT personnel from your side! You may also compare it with http://www.rosslynanalytics.com/rapid-analytics-platform/applications/qlikview-ondemand .

A hosted by Tableau Software solution is particularly useful when sharing dashboards with customers and partners because the solution is secure but outside a company’s firewall. In the case of Tableau Online users can publish interactive dashboards to the web and share them with clients or partners without granting behind-the-firewall access.

Since Tableau 8 has new Data Extract API, you can do all data refreshes behind your own firewall and republish your TDE files in the cloud anytime (even automatically, on demand or on schedule) you need. Tableau Online has no minimum number of users and can scale as a company grows. At any point, a company can migrate to Tableau Server to manage it in-house. Here is some introductionla video about Tableau Online: Get started with Tableau Online.

Tableau Server in the cloud provides at least 3 ways to update your data (more details see here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/learn/whitepapers/tableau-online-understanding-data-updates )

republish Data Source or Workbook;

Use Command-Line Tools to Schedule Batch Updates Locally and automatically, see more details here: http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/current/pro/online/en-us/help.html#extracting_TDE.html;

refresh the Tableau Server Data Source using your Tableau Desktop as a proxy between your on-premise Data Source and Tableau Online:

Here is another, more lengthy intro into Tableau BI in Cloud:

Tableau as a Service is a step in right direction, but be cautious: in practice, the architecture of the hosted version could impact performance. Plus, the nature of the product means that Tableau isn’t really able to offer features like pay-as-you-go that have made cloud-based software popular with workers. By their nature, data visualization products require access to data. For businesses that store their data internally, they must publish their data to Tableau’s servers. That can be a problem for businesses that have large amounts of data or that are prevented from shifting their data off premises for legal or security reasons. It could also create a synchronization nightmare, as workers play with data hosted at Tableau that may not be as up-to-date as internally stored data. Depending on the location of the customer relative to Tableau’s data center, data access could be slow.

And finally, the online version requires the desktop client, which costs $2,000. Tableau may implement Tableau desktop analytical features in a browser in the future while continue to support the desktop and on-premise model to meet security and regulations facing some customers.

Reading Pointers 2/13-5/13

Stephen Few asking you a tricky question: Are You a Data Scientist?: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1719 . It seems to me that Stephen agrees with me that 3 Terms: Data Scientist, Data Science and Big Data are full of BS… or as our VP will say: “a Bunch of Malarkey”…

3 very important articles by Russel Christopher about History Tables in Tableau 8:

http://tableaulove.tumblr.com/post/51220703630/tableau-server-v8-history-tables-part-3-the-kitchen

http://tableaulove.tumblr.com/post/50645286039/tableau-server-v8-history-tables-part-2-events

http://tableaulove.tumblr.com/post/50529179435/tableau-server-v8-history-tables

A funny “Preview” by Stephen Few of Tableau 9: Gauges?!: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1706

Leverage PowerShell and Tableau to Extract Server Datasources: https://www.interworks.com/blogs/mroberts/2013/05/28/leverage-powershell-and-tableau-extract-server-datasources

Tableau 7 data dictionary: http://tableaulove.tumblr.com/post/50438516817/better-late-than-never-tableau-7-data-dictionary

Collection of Good Practices, provided by Tableau: : http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/community/best-practices

Tableau Server has many built in features to promote data exploration, collaboration, and security. The Data Server is arguably the most powerful of these tools but is commonly overlooked and underutilized. Answer these questions to see how the Data Server can save you time and increase productivity. http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/blog/2013/4/unleash-tableau-data-server-23038

Using Tableau 8 to Leverage Your ‘Big-ish’ Data: https://www.interworks.com/blogs/mroberts/2013/04/08/using-tableau-8-leverage-your-big-ish-data

“New in 8: Word Clouds”: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/02/new-8-word-clouds-1825

“What Makes a Chart Boring?”: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1612

Emotional reactions to Tableau 8: http://www.datarevelations.com/dylans-gone-electric-emotional-reactions-to-tableau-8.html

Leverage Multiple Tableau Data Extracts for Big Data in Tableau 8: : https://www.interworks.com/blogs/mroberts/2013/04/25/leverage-multiple-tableau-data-extracts-big-data-tableau-8

Leverage the Tableau 8 Tableau Data Extract Command-Line Utility Without Tabcmd : https://www.interworks.com/blogs/mroberts/2013/04/15/leverage-tableau-8-tableau-data-extract-command-line-utility-without-tabcm

Very popular article from Stephen Few about Tableau losing the clear vision of its youth collected 49 comments from known experts : http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1532 and most interesting, 50th comment came from Stephen fimself: “I recently learned that when my review of Tableau 8 was published, Tableau employees were forbidden from responding publicly”.

UK Boundary Polygon Data from Information Lab: http://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2013/03/25/uk-area-polygon-mapping-in-tableau/

Sample of how to use DataExtract API with C#/.NET: http://community.tableausoftware.com/message/203714#203714

Tableau Data Blending, Sparse Data, Multiple Levels of Granularity, and Improvements in Version 8: http://drawingwithnumbers.artisart.org/tableau-data-blending-sparse-data-multiple-levels-of-granularity-and-improvements-in-version-8/

Tableau Custom SQL connections through the JET driver: https://www.interworks.com/blogs/jwright/2013/02/22/musings-tableau-custom-sql-connections-through-jet-driver

Software company XL Cubed has incorporated Bandlines into their product, but comments to post showing that Tableau has it fro a while too: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1485

Stepheb Few introduced Bandlines as Sparklines Enriched with Information about Magnitude and Distribution: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/introducing_bandlines.pdf

Time for Tableau is now: Part 2 – IPO

Tableau Software filed for IPO, on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “DATA”. In sharp contrast to other business-software makers that have gone public in the past year, Tableau is profitable, despite hiring huge number of new employees. For the years ended December 31, 2010, 2011 and 2012, Tableau’s total revenue were $34.2 million, $62.4 million and $127.7 million for 2012. Number of full-time employees increased from 188 as of December 31, 2010 to 749 as of December 31, 2012.

Tableau’s biggest shareholder is venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, with a 38 percent stake. Founder Pat Hanrahan owns 18 percent, while co-founders Christopher Stolte and Christian Chabot, who is also chief executive officer, each own more than 15 percent. Meritech Capital Partners controls 6.4 percent. Tableau recognized three categories of Primary Competitors:

large suppliers of traditional business intelligence products, like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP AG;

spreadsheet software providers, such as Microsoft Corporation

business analytics software companies: Qlik Technologies Inc. and TIBCO Spotfire.

Update 4/29/13: This news maybe related to Tableau IPO: I understand that Microstrategy’s growth cannot be compared with growth of Tableau or even Qliktech. But to go below of the average “BI market” growth? Or even 6% or 24% decrease? What is going on (?) here : “First quarter 2013 revenues were $130.2 million versus $138.3 million for the first quarter of 2012, a 6% decrease. Product licenses revenues for the first quarter of 2013 were $28.4 million versus $37.5 million for the first quarter of 2012, a 24% decrease.”

Update 5/6/13: Tableau Software Inc. will sell 5 million shares, while shareholders will sell 2.2 million shares, Tableau said in an amended filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The underwriters have the option to purchase up to an additional 1,080,000 shares. It means total can be 8+ millions of shares for sale.

The company expects its initial public offer to raise up to $215.3 million at a price of $23 to $26 per share. If this happened, that will create public company with large capitalization, so Qliktech and Spotfire will have an additional problem to worry about. This is how QLIK (blue line), TIBX (red) and MSTR (orange line) stock behaved during last 6 weeks after release of Tableau 8 and official Tableau IPO announcement:

Update 5/16/13: According to this article at Seeking Alpha (also see S-1 Form) Tableau Software Inc. (symbol “DATA”) is scheduled a $176 million IPO with a market capitalization of $1.4 billion for Friday, May 17, 2013. Tableau’s March Quarter sales were up 60% from the March ’12 quarter. Qliktech’s sales were up only 23% on a similar comparative basis.

According to other article, Tableau raised it IPO price and it may reach capitalization of $2B by end of Friday, 5/17/13. That is almost comparable with capitalization of Qliktech…

Update 5/17/13: Tableau’s IPO offer price was $31 per share, but it started today

with price $47 and finished day with $50.75 (raising $400M in one day) with estimated Market Cap around $3B (or more?). It is hard to understand the market: Tableau Stock (symbol: DATA) finished its first day above $50 with Market Capitalization higher than QLIK, which today has Cap = $2.7B but Qliktech has almost 3 times more of sales then Tableau!

For comparison MSTR today has Cap = $1.08B and TIBX today has Cap = $3.59B. While I like Tableau, today proved that most investors are crazy, if you compare numbers in this simple table:

Symbol : Market Cap, $B, as of 5/17/13 Revenue, $M, as of 3/31/13 (trailing 12 months) FTE (Full Time Employees) TIBX 3.59 1040 3646 MSTR 1.08 586 3172 QLIK 2.67 406 1425 DATA between $2B and $3B? 143 834

See interview with Co-Founder of Tableau Software Christian Chabot – he discusses taking the company’s IPO with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.” However it makes me sad when Tableau’s CEO is implying that Tableau is ready for big data, which is not true.

Here are some pictures of the Tableau team at the NYSE: http://www.tableausoftware.com/ipo-photos and here is the announcement about “closing IPO”.

Time for Tableau is now…

Today Tableau 8 was released with 90+ new features (actually it may be more than 130) after exhausting 6+ months of Alpha and Beta Testing with 3900+ customers as Beta Testers! I personally expected it it 2 months ago, but I rather will have it with less bugs and this is why I have no problem with delay. During this “delay” Tableau Public achieved the phenomenal Milestone: 100 millions of users… Tableau 8 introduced:

web and mobile authoring,

added access to new data sources: Google Analytics, Salesforce.com, Cloudera Impala, DataStax Enterprise, Hadapt, Hortonworks Hadoop Hive, SAP HANA, and Amazon Redshift.

New Data Extract API that allows programmers to load data from anywhere into Tableau and make certain parts of Tableau Licensing ridiculous, because consuming part of licensing (for example core licensing) for background tasks should be set free now.

New JavaScript API enables integration with business (and other web-) applications.

Local Rendering: leveraging the graphics hardware acceleration available on ordinary computers. Tableau 8 Server dynamically determines where rendering will complete faster – on the server or in the browser. Also – and acts accordingly. Also Dashboards now render views in parallel when possible.

Tableau Software plans to add in next versions (after 8.0) some very interesting and competitive features, like:

Direct query of large databases, quick and easy ETL and data integration.

Tableau on a Mac and Tableau as a pure Cloud offering.

Make statistical & analytical techniques accessible (I wonder if it means integration with R?).

Tableau founder Pat Hanrahan recently talked about “Showing is Not Explaining”, so Tableau planned to add features that support storytelling by constructing visual narratives and effective communication of ideas.

I did not see on Tableau’s roadmap some very long overdue features like 64-bit implementation (currently even all Tableau Server processes, except one, are 32-bit!), Server implementation on Linux (we do not want to pay Windows 2012 Server CAL taxes to Bill Gates) and direct mentioning of integration with R like Spotfire does – I how those planning and strategic mistakes will not impact upcoming IPO.

I personally think that Tableau has to stop using its ridiculous practice when 1 core license used per each 1 Backgrounder server process and since Tableau Data Extract API is free so all Tableau Backgrounder Processes should be free and have to be able to run on any hardware and even any OS.

Tableau 8 managed to get the negative feedback from famous Stephen Few, who questioned Tableau’s ability to stay on course. His unusually long blog-post “Tableau Veers from the Path” attracted enormous amount of comments from all kind of Tableau experts. I will be cynical here and notice that there is no such thing as negative publicity and more publicity is better for upcoming Tableau IPO.

to DV or to D3 – that is the question

The most popular (among business users) approach to visualization is to use a Data Visualization (DV) tool like Tableau (or Qlikview or Spotfire), where a lot of features already implemented for you. Recent prove of this amazing popularity is that at least 100 million people (as of February 2013), used Tableau Public as their Data Visualization tool of choice, see

http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/blog/2013/2/crossing-100-million-milestone-21304

However, to make your documents and stories (and not just your data visualization applications) driven by your data, you may need the other approach – to code visualization of your data into your story and visualization libraries like popular D3 toolkit can help you. D3 stands for “Data-Driven Documents”. The Author of D3 Mr. Mike Bostock designs interactive graphics for New York Times – one of latest samples is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/20/movies/among-the-oscar-contenders-a-host-of-connections.html

and NYT allows him to do a lot of Open Source work which he demonstartes at his website here:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery .

Mike was a “visualization scientist” and a computer science PhD student at #Stanford University and member of famous group of people, now called “Stanford Visualization Group”:

http://vis.stanford.edu/people/

This Visualization Group was a birthplace of Tableau’s prototype – sometimes they called it “a Visual Interface” for exploring data and other name for it is Polaris:

http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects/polaris/

and we know that creators of Polaris started Tableau Software. One of other Group’s popular “products” was a graphical toolkit (mostly in JavaScript, as oppose to Polaris, written in C++) for Visualization, called ProtoVis:

http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/

– and Mike Bostock was one of ProtoViz’s main co-authors. Less then 2 years ago Visualization Group suddenly stopped developing ProtoViz and recommended to everybody to switch to D3 library

https://github.com/mbostock,

authored by Mike. This library is Open Source (only 100KB in ZIP format) and can be downloaded from here:

http://d3js.org/d3.v3.zip

In order to use D3, you need to be comfortable with HTML, CSS, SVG, Javascript programming, DOM (and other Web Standards); understanding of jQuery paradigm will be useful too. Basically if you want to be at least partially as good as Mike Bostock, you need to have a mindset of a programmer (I guess in addition to business user mindset), like this D3 expert:

http://www.jasondavies.com/

Most of successful early D3 adopters combining even 3+ mindsets: programmer, business analyst, data artist and even sometimes data storyteller. For your programmer’s mindset you may be interested to know that D3 has a large set of Plugins, see:

https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins

and rich #API, see https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/API-Reference

You can find hundreds of D3 demos, samples, examples, tools, products and even a few companies using D3 here: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

5000 Points: Local Rendering is here

Human eye cannot process effectively more than a few (thousands) datapoints per View.

Additionally, in Data Visualization you have other restrictions:

number of pixels on your screen (may be 2-3 millions maximum) available for your View (Chart or Dashboard).

time to render millions of Datapoints can be too long and may create a bad User Experience (too much waiting).

time to load your Datapoints into your View; if you wish to have a good User Experience, than 2-3 seconds is maximum user can wait for. If you have a live connection to datasource, than 2-3 seconds mean a few thousands of Datapoints maximum.

again, more Datapoints you will put in your View, more crowded it will be and less useful and less understandable your View will be for your users.

Recently, some Vendors started to add new reason for you (called Local Rendering) to restrict yourself in terms of how much of Datapoints you need to put into your DataView: usage of Client-side hardware (especially its Graphical Hardware) for so called “Local Rendering”.

Local rendering means that Data Visualization Server will send DataPoints instead of Images to Client and Rendering of Image will happened on Client-side, using capability of modern Web Browsers (to use Client’s Hardware) and HTML5 Canvas technology.

For example, the new feature in Tableau Server 8 will automatically switch to Local Rendering if number of DataPoints in your DataView (Worksheet with your Chart or Dashboard) is less then 5000 DataPoints (Marks in Tableau Speak). In addition to faster rendering it means less round-trips to Server (for example when you hover your mouse over Datapoint, in old world it means round-trip to Server) and faster Drill-down, Selection and Filtering operations.

Update 3/19/13: James Baker from Tableau Software explains why Tableau 8 Dashboards in Web Browser feel more responsive:

http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/blog/2013/3/quiet-revolution-rendering-21874

James explained that “HTML5’s canvas element” is used as drawing surface. He underscored that it’s much faster to send images rather than data because image size does not scale up linearly. James included a short video shows incremental filtering in a browser, one of the features of Local Rendering.