In June 2019, Salesforce completed its $15.7 billion acquisition of Seattle-based company Tableau. The all-stock deal is Salesforce's most significant acquisition yet, and today Tableau continues to ride on its new-found synergy.
Over the last 12 months, as the deal closed in the U.S. and the U.K., experts pondered the implications of Tableau’s integration into Salesforce.
As the entire market trends towards more advanced analytics, where AI and machine learning are blended with traditional analytics and business intelligence capabilities, Tableau AI features are set to complement Salesforce.
Through the acquisition, the SaaS giant has been looking to accelerate Tableau's mission to help people understand data. Under Salesforce, the Seattle company is likely to evolve its AI technology assets.
So far in 2020, Tableau's product roadmap includes two significant updates for 0.1, which improved admin and modeling features for 2020.2. "We're going to add more features around analytics, around self-service, around enterprise, around cloud, around Salesforce," Chief Product Officer at Tableau, Francois Ajenstat told TechRepublic. "I've got to tell you, the future is bright. There's so much coming. I'm so excited about the road ahead."
Beyond boosting the analytics capabilities of the cloud-based CRM, the acquisition is also expected to expand Tableau's influence on a broader customer base.
The company also recently launched new cloud regions in Japan and Australia, where it already had a significant presence.
"Tableau is an integral part of the Salesforce digital transformation strategy and focus," explained the company's Senior Vice President of Asia-Pacific, JY Pook. "With the addition of Tableau, we are providing a leading analytics platform by complementing Salesforce's portfolio, so there is great synergy there. We are able to help their customers tap powerful analytics anywhere for any data."
Ajenstat echoes these sentiments and adds that, along with Salesforce, Tableau is going to "make it so easy to visualize, explore, and analyze all Salesforce data, whether it's sales cloud, or service cloud, marketing cloud, or commerce cloud." The company will also leverage Salesforce's Einstein Analytics by taking its predictive capabilities and mesh them into the current platform. "And because we're all about innovation, we're going to look to accelerate the innovation and find new ways to leverage Salesforce technologies to bring even more value to Tableau customers," Ajenstat adds.
Ultimately, this deal is set to intensify competition between Salesforce and Microsoft, which competes with Tableau through its Power BI data visualization and business intelligence technology. Microsoft already contends with Salesforce's core business with its Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management technology.
