BI Scorecard Blog

Tableau Adds Web Authoring, Files for IPO

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

At the end of March, Tableau Software released version 8 of its product, both improving its core visual data discovery capabilities and upping the ante in its challenge to traditional BI. In addition, the privately held company filed its application for an initial public offering, expected in summer and to trade under the ticker symbol "DATA."

Version 8 packs over 90 new features but the most noteworthy is support for browser-based authoring. To date, Tableau has been a desktop project in which analysts build models, visualizations, and dashboards. These dashboards could then be shared and published to the Web where others could filter or sort, but not much else. With Tableau 8, any user with access to a browser or an iPad can now create a new query, a capability more often available in business query tools such as SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence or IBM Cognos Workspace. (For a list of who uses desktop or browser-based authoring, refer to BI Scorecard's free BI Market Segment report). To be clear, users will not be able to create new models or complex calculations from a browser, but they can create a new query and visualization, a big step up from earlier versions.

In terms of Mobile BI capabilities, most users currently want to access and interact with published content, something Tableau already had. Authoring from an iPad, though, is an industry rarity, particularly via a native iPad app, so it's too early to tell if this will be a boon for customers. More important, in my opinion, is disconnected access or airplane mode, a feature still lacking in version 8.

While these improvements position Tableau more squarely in the business query tools market, Tableau has also enhanced its visualization engine, to mixed reviews. Visualization expert and author Stephen Few is critical of some of the changes in 8, citing a poor implementation of Tree Maps and that the new Tag Clouds should not have been added at all. I found the new Tree Maps straightforward, but arguably, the grouping abilities in TIBCO Spotfire and MicroStrategy Visual Insight, for example, are better. While I agree with Few's point that the grouping ability in the tree maps could be improved, any vendor has to deliver new capabilities incrementally. Tag or word clouds are an interesting sore point with a number of visualization experts. As an industry invention (they started as HTML tags), they sometimes seem to offer little more than demo appeal. Across multiple tools there is room for improvement in how the words are organized (alphabetically or with the largest in the middle? How to show associated words?), but when analyzing textual information, word clouds are useful. They way in which they are implemented in Tableau 8, through the use of Marks rather than a graph type, could be made more straight forward. For a more detailed analysis of Tableau 8, with side-by-side competitor scores, visit BI Scorecard).

Shortly after the release of 8, Tableau also filed its application for an IPO. This move allays customers concerns about the risk of acquisition and brings more transparency to company financials. As detailed in the filing, Tableau's revenues more than doubled from 2011 to 2012 to $127.7 million. Since 2009, Tableau has been growing more than 80% per year. The IPO filing also includes details on R&D spending. As customers have increasingly asked us about vendor innovation and R&D spending, we recently added some of these metrics to the BI Scorecard Vendor Strategic Summary.

With the release of Tableau 8 and the IPO filing, visual data discovery continues to be one of the hottest categories in the BI market this year.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard.

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SAP Commits To Cloud, Beefs Up Mobile And In-Memory Options

At SAP’s seventh annual influencer summit in Boston last week, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe highlighted four areas of SAP innovation: core, mobile, cloud, and in-memory. Interesting to me is that SAP now considers the core to include business intelligence (or to use SAP’s umbrella term, business analytics) as well as its well-established business applications.

Mobile, cloud, and in-memory also cut across both BI and SAP’s business applications.  In mobile, SAP currently has a number of first-mover and competitive advantages. Sybase Unwired gives them a development platform as well as device management. SAP now has 30+ mobile applications. However, in the BI space, its solutions are mixed (check out BI Scorecard's  latest summary scorecard here to see how they stack up), depending on the device and the BI content. For example, mobile interfaces vary depending on whether they're from the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 WebIntelligence, Crystal, Explorer, Dashboards.  Look for this to improve in 2012 (with more detail in this article about what's ahead in SAP BusinessObjects Feature Pack 3).

For cloud, SAP BusinessObjects was one of the first BI platform vendors to have an on-demand strategy. Day two of this summit was largely focused on cloud computing, with SAP emphasizing existing and new cloud applications, including  Sales OnDemand, Sourcing OnDemand , Travel OnDemand and so on.  The  pending acquisition of SuccessFactors will position SAP as the numbertwo SaaS vendor in revenue after SalesForce.com. SuccessFactors provides employee performance management capabilities in the cloud, with 15 million users and a 70% growth rate.

All of this shows SAP is committed to the cloud, but here, BI was like a forgotten step-child. One exec said, “except for Business ByDesign, we didn’t have cloud solutions to sell until this year.” Maybe he misspoke, but it reinforced my perception that BI OnDemand has been more of a check-box than a fully supported BI cloud strategy. In yet another show of stepped-up commitment to cloud, Google announced it will integrate Google Apps with SAP Business ByDesign, the company’s cloud-based business applications suite.

Meanwhile, there is little doubt about SAP’s commitment to in-memory with its Hana technology expected to power not just BI but also business applications. SAP’s vision for in-memory and Hana is to redefine real time. Snabe declared in-memory as the next-generation architecture. He took a subtle dig at Oracle’s (not explicitly naming the vendor) use of "hybrid" technology (relational plus in-memory) in Exalytics, saying hybrids don’t last. 

The benefits of in-memory in terms of real-time, analytic complexity, and performance were backed up by a number of customer testimonials. However, we have to remember that the number of live deployments are probably in the low hundreds. I suspect this is both because of the newness of the product (GA’d in June this year), but also the steep cost for customer to acquire. SAP claims lower long-term ownership costs compared to traditional BW and relational deployments but upfront expenses can be an obstacle. SAP needs to figure out how to bring in-memory to customers with lower budgets. This may be where Hana in the cloud has a role to play or competitors such as QlikTech will continue to expand. Hana will also be the database powering BI On Demand.

One of the most interesting announcements in this area was planned support by third-party vendors including  Tableau and Tibco Spotfire. Tableau has long had a philosophy and architecture of not requiring customers to replicate data into their in-memory engine (an option added in 2010 through Tableau Version 6). So support for SAP’s HANA makes sense. It’s a notable contrast to Oracle, which discontinued its OEM relationship with Tableau earlier this year.  You can preview a demo of Tableau running on  Hana here. Spotfire, in contrast, has typically had an extract-and-load-into-memory approach (with  a drill on demand option), so I will be curious to see how this is implemented. Neither solution is, as of yet, generally available.

Customer FreshDirect provided an interesting view of their journey to self-service BI. They are using SAP's newly released Event Insight to track on-time delivery during the day. Unexpected events like Obama coming to town can certainly disrupt their deliveries throughout New York City. Event Insight alerts them to issues and enables them to quickly add reserve trucks to routes when delays pop up.

FreshDirect routinely monitors BI usage and if someone is not frequently using their license, it gets taken away and allocated to another user. Users author their own reports on everything from delivery performance to number of parking tickets. “If you don’t have access to analytics, you’re going to get squashed by your competition, ” says Brandon Arbiter, FreshDirect's manager of business intelligence.

It was a big picture kind of summit, so I had to reflect on where SAP has been in BI and where it’s going. Executive VP of Business Analytics Sanjay Poonen committed to being best of breed in BI. I couldn’t help recall SAP’s stance prior to the BusinessObjects acquisition, striving only to be "good enough." It’s better for customers and the industry that they are now pursuing excellence.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

Tableau Launches Version 7, Challenges Old School BI

Tableau rocked Las Vegas last week at its annual user conference, with over 1400 attending. This double the number attending the prior year, a reflection of the company’s rapid growth and enthusiasm for its “rapid-fire analytics.”

CEO and co-founder Christian Chabot kicked off the conference with a keynote that both inspired attendees and summarily bashed traditional BI.  He described the predominant form of business intelligence as “heavy, complicated, inflexible, slow moving, expensive. Data could be saving the day but it isn’t.” He challenged companies to free themselves of the “shackles of old school BI and to seize the opportunity to bring data out of the dark cellar to improve people’s lives.”

I had to chuckle at such boldly leveled criticism. Sometimes BI is complicated because the data is such a mess. That’s not the fault of the BI platform vendors, and it’s a problem that can plague a Tableau implementation as well. But part of Tableau’s appeal and reason for exceptional growth is both the ease in which it can be deployed, but also, the rapid time to build visualizations and dashboards with little to no training and no assistance from IT. Tableau does make BI beautiful and fun, no doubt influenced in part by chief scientist and co-founder Pat Hanrahan, an early employee at Pixar with Steve Jobs.

If you’ve read my book Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App or heard me speak on themes from it, then you know that I too have said BI can make the world a better place. So I was most inspired by Chabot’s discussion of how Seattle Children’s Hospital is using Tableau to improve care and reduce costs.  Seeing a picture of Chabot in the operating room reflected this CEO’s desire to understand first hand where Tableau is making a difference. You can listen to their story here. In talking to Seattle Children's, I also liked that the Tableau evangelist, a business person, also insisted that the IT people tour the operating room so they could better understand the impact the dashboards were having. It would have been better, of course, if the IT people asked for the tour themselves, but maybe that kind of initiative from IT is still too much wishful thinking on my part.

A key theme to the conference was Tableau 7, now in beta and expected to become generally available within 90 days. Reflecting a culture that cares about its employees, Tableau flew all its 300 plus employees to Las Vegas so they too could learn from customers. Seven engineers, dubbed the magnificent seven, took to the main stage to share highlights of the next release. I can’t think of another  conference that so bravely put the brains behind the products in a keynote rather than a manager or marketing VP. It could have been a flop, but these people were amusing, smart, and above all, passionate about their work. Software engineer Iain Heath showed the improved mapping feature in Tableau that can interpret inconsistent country names. In looking at something labeled, “Britain,” he quipped, “is Britain no longer Great?” (I am married to an Englishman, in case you didn’t know.)

One of the biggest improvements in version 7 is the ability to centrally share the Tableau Data Engine while allowing multiple worksheets, created by multiple authors to leverage it. In the past, data and presentation were more tightly tied together. This new approach allows the engine to act as a kind of data mart. It also allows an author to create and share the meta data layer, with or without storing the data. This will be an important differentiator versus QlikTech.

In launching Tableau 7, a fun theme of the conference party was the Seven Wonders of the World. Can you name them (skip to the end to see the answers)? I liked the wine tasting in Italy, but rushed through the cigar smoke in Brazil. Kudos to the designer of the "Seven Wonders Passport," one of those many loyal employees I got to meet.

This was the first Tableau conference I had ever attended, even though I’ve been evaluating Tableau since 2007. The energy and focus reminded me of BI conferences before all the industry consolidation. I look forward to putting the new release through its paces!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, www.BIScorecard.com

The Seven Wonders of the World (in no particular order)

Great Wall of China

Petra in Jordan

Christ the Redeemer in Brazil

Machu Picchu in Peru

Chichen Itza in Mexico

Colosseum in Italy

Taj Mahal in India