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February 19, 2015

Tableau Sees Global Growth

SEATTLE, Wash., Feb. 19 — On the heels of its 2014 earnings announcement, Tableau shared figures on the record growth of its business analytics products. After five years of exponential growth, the company reached $913 million in lifetime revenue – $413 million of which was generated in 2014. With that achievement, Tableau has become one of the fastest growing companies in the fifty-year history of business analytics software.

“In the average week more than 150 organizations are moving to the Tableau way,” said Christian Chabot, CEO and Co-founder of Tableau. “People are looking for analytics technology that is fast, easy, and for everyone. They want to put the power of data into the hands of people at all levels of their companies. We saw the strongest demand we’ve ever seen in our history, making 2014 a tipping point year for Tableau.”

Tableau’s mission to help people see and understand data has come to define a new era of analytics. Its accelerated growth comes as data generation around the world has exploded and the skill to analyze it has become critical. Customers call Tableau smart and fun – a far cry from the complicated business intelligence systems of the prior era.

Tableau’s growth was also driven by tremendous international expansion in 2014. The company now has customers in 150 countries, half of which reported triple digit growth in 2014. Japan and Switzerland led the pack with sales growth of more than 200 percent year over year.  Internationally, Tableau has experienced revenue growth of over 100 percent for four consecutive years.

The company’s product innovation continues at a pace seldom seen in enterprise software companies. In 2014, Tableau invested $90 million on research and development, more than the previous two years combined. Dr. Forest Baskett, Tableau Board Member and General Partner at New Enterprise Associates, notes, “Tableau’s R&D investment ratio is among the highest of all public technology companies. They have an inspiring commitment to research and innovation, and their best years are in front of them.” Tableau grew its headcount by 735, including growing its research and development team by 50 percent. As of the year-end 2014, its total headcount is now 1,947.

Tableau now has more than 26,000 customer accounts around the world, including leading companies, government agencies, and universities. Companies using Tableau include FedEx, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Unilever, and thousands of large and small businesses around the world.  Customers also include nonprofit organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Pan American Health Organization. Education customers include Oxford UniversityStanford University, The University of Texas, and Duke University.

Audi AG is using Tableau to share data in almost every division of the organization. Audi’s business intelligence team needed to move the company away from an old analytics system, which they compared to ‘1980s graphics.’ The switch to Tableau and self-service analytics became transformational for the company, helping its teams understand data faster than ever. “With Tableau we really were able to use our data to inspire our people very, very quickly,” said Stephan Sachs, Manager of Audi AG’s BI Program.

Headquartered in Japan, MUJI is one of the top new home brands recognized for its purposeful and beautiful designs of house goods. It has 640 stores worldwide. MUJI chose Tableau to make more sense out of its data, particularly in the areas of promotions and multi-channel sales. MUJI uses Tableau on top of cloud-based Amazon Redshift to analyze roughly 300 million rows of data generated from online and mobile sales as well as from brick-and-mortar stores.

The Brooklyn Public Library in New York serves 2.5 million people and is home to millions of books. The library wanted to make more data-driven decisions but was hampered by its reliance on outside consultants and a dated reporting solution. Since adopting Tableau, the Library has cut reporting time by two weeks. Now, everyone from leadership to branch librarians, has access to data. “Tableau is unbelievably beautiful and easy. And it can connect to basically any data source under the sun,” said Nissa Wibecam, a Systems Administrator at Brooklyn Public Library. “When you work with Tableau, it’s fun. And you wouldn’t say that of any other report-writing product. Ever.”

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