Tableau Sharpens Swiss Knife Approach

Business intelligence analytics and visualization startup Tableau has pitched itself as a vendor with the ability to let user data speak in unique ways—and also as a company that has a story that is itself founded in creativity.

In its anything-but-typical “About” section, Tableau Software states: “Put together an Academy Award-winning professor, a brilliant computer scientist at the world’s most prestigious university, and a savvy business leader with a passion for data.” Sounds more like a pitch for the latest tech-themed Hollywood flick, but this approach seems to be working, at least in terms of drawing attention to the small Seattle-area outfit.

The grand story aside, one thing that seems to have really grabbed attention is the “Tableau Public” service, which lets users from anywhere come onto the Tableau platform to create and share rather dramatic data visualizations on everything from social web to scientific sets.

On the other end, however, are the enterprise-level services that are catching on at a number of Fortune 500s. To expand their reach into these  just announced the release of a licensed connector providing users with the ability to integrate data from Cloudera’s hadoop–based distro into their Tableau 7.0 software.

Tableau’s technology is aimed at automating common business reporting tasks using Visual Query Language (VizQL), and making visual data reporting quickly available to the user. According to the company:

“At the heart of Tableau is a proprietary technology that makes interactive data visualization an integral part of understanding data. A traditional analysis tool forces you to analyze data in rows and columns, choose a subset of your data to present, organize that data into a table, then create a chart from that table. VizQL skips those steps and creates a visual representation of your data right away, giving you visual feedback as you analyze.”

In short, the software appears to have been developed for quick access to answer bottom-line questions. This strategy seems to be working for Tableau as it has more than quadrupled its customer base since 2007 with clients including Bank of America, Coca-Cola, WalMart, the US Army and Yale University.

Marcia Schels, director of Enterprise Systems at Yale University explained in an interview how Tableau’s BI solution has reduced overall time required to create financial reports.

“Tableau has improved productivity for my developers. The campaign dashboard took about five people five months to produce in other tools and a matter of days with Tableau. So, you can see the savings we can have with that. On the end user side, the fund raisers would have had to go to various different reports, various different websites, and look up things for themselves. Now it’s all in one consolidated place. With the click of a button, they can pull together all the information they want to get a real picture of the prospects and to be able to target who they should be talking to. With the visual representation, Tableau quickly shows you were you should be focusing your attention.”

One of the main features of Tableau’s BI application is its ability to simultaneously analyze information from multiple data sources quickly. Like a Swiss army knife, it acts as an analytics multi-tool that connects to Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and Greenplum, allowing the user to interact and build comparisons from differing datasets without requiring another software solution.

After today’s release of the Cloudera Hadoop connector, Tableau has added one more tool to its swiss army knife solution.