Tableau, the provider of its eponymous data visualization software, held its annual Tableau Conference in San Diego. The conference focused on the new product and partnership announcements from the company and highlighted the interesting visualizations created by Tableau’s core user base of data analysts and new features being introduced by the company’s developers. The company announced several specific product enhancements, which I’ve noted below.
Product Enhancements
- Local file save with Tableau Desktop Public Edition: This feature enables users to work with and save data securely and locally on their desktop or share it online with the Tableau Public community. Essentially, this feature allows users to develop visualizations and reveal or share them with their stakeholders on their schedule rather than when they are in development.
- Viz Extensions: These new visualization extensions permit users to more quickly create custom visualizations directly from the Marks card, including Sankey, Sunbursts, Chords, Beeswarms, and more, enabling data analysts to tell a story through data with less friction and effort.
- Data and Governance: Tableau announced several enhancements around data and data governance, which are designed to provide more granular visibility and control over data, data sources, and visualizations.
- Data Cockpit: This feature is designed to answer Tableau administrators’ most frequently asked questions about who has contributed to the site, the data being used, whether or not that data is certified, and other attributes.
- Composable Data Sources: Composable Data Sources is designed to help data analysts create a single source of truth that can be enriched via additional context, and those derived sources are structured so that changes made upstream to centralized data automatically cascade to analysts’ data sources downstream, keeping them updated and synchronized.
- Einstein Copilot for Tableau Prep and Sentiment Analysis: AI-powered Einstein Copilot will be available for Tableau Prep and Tableau Catalog, enabling the calculation of the sentiment of raw text data, which can be blended, providing a complete flow.
- Einstein Copilot for Tableau Catalog: Einstein for Catalog can generate a detailed summary using metadata and field names, providing a relevant, contextualized description of the data sources so that anyone understands the underlying data, and site admins can certify the data.
Analysis and Visualization
Tableau also introduced several updates and enhancements to its platform focused on providing more detailed analysis and advanced visualization capabilities.
- Spatial Parameters: Spatial Parameters offer geocoding at the address level and distance or buffer analysis.
- Google Fonts: New, web-safe Google Fonts that work on Tableau Cloud and on the web are now available, offering the functionality to reformat your dashboard to comply with an organization’s brand guidelines, enhancing readability, simplicity, and cross-device compatibility.
Platform and Embedding
Several new updates to the platform focus on administrative improvements, the ability to share dashboards, and adding customized Tableau Pulse features to a company’s website to allow data consumers to leverage data more easily within the flow of work.
In addition, Tableau announced the following updates:
- Attribute Based Membership (ABAC): ABAC dynamically manages authorization using groups, which can save admins time by leveraging metadata from an identity provider.
- Localization via User Attribute Functions: User Attribute Functions allow dashboards to be translated to a wide variety of languages, allowing users to interpret data in their preferred language.
- Tableau Pulse Metrics in Dashboards: Tableau Pulse can be added within a dashboard, providing customized metric cards and insights embedded into a site.
- Microsoft Teams: Users are now able to embed Tableau Pulse insights in Microsoft Teams.
Tableau Conference 2024 – Key Insights and Learnings
Immediately following the events, I posted my initial thoughts on LinkedIn. Reflecting on these observations after a good night’s sleep, I wanted to expand on these thoughts below.
1) Tableau has a dedicated and loyal base of users whose influence cannot be denied.
One of the most interesting aspects about Tableau is the enthusiasm from its data analyst core customers. Throughout the keynote address, there were multiple, boisterous displays of approval whenever a new feature was announced. While some of the over-the-top responses were no doubt designed to elicit laughs from the audience, it is clear that the Tableau has done a great job of cultivating a loyal customer base by listening to customer feedback and implementing new features and changes in response. While management noted that not every suggestion is acted upon, they understand that being empathetic and responsive to customer feedback is essential to the success of the product.
The challenge that Tableau will continue to face is translating that user enthusiasm and loyalty into increased revenue. Data analysts use the product but few have the corporate purchasing authority and can only influence purchase decisions at scale. Tableau will need to focus on ways to closely link the user benefits to real business ROI, largely around the total economic value provided by increased access to powerful visualizations leveraged across the organization.
2) Tableau is taking a thoughtful and measured approach to incorporating new tech, which may frustrate users and outside observers, but this strategy is prudent, as negative first impressions to half-baked feature implementations are often hard to overcome.
During executive and product-manager presentations to analysts, Tableau leadership detailed several interesting features and capabilities that the development team is working on and testing. While these were presented under a non-disclosure agreement, suffice it to say the company is actively working to improve the power and functionality of the application and access to data and insights, which will be powered in part by predictive and generative AI. However, the company has taken a more conservative approach to rolling out features, even as some of the company’s competitors have rolled out similar features, either in public beta or even in generally available releases.
Tableau is positioned as a premium offering in the marketplace, and it is a prudent approach by management to ensure that any new features or enhancements, whether powered by generative AI or other underlying technology, have been fully tested and perform smoothly and reliably for users. This is how Tableau will continue to engender trust among its passionate and loyal user base.
3) Tableau is embracing a more open technology ecosystem, and is focused on providing insights within the flow of work, even if it is not within a Tableau or Salesforce app.
One of the major trends across the enterprise application market is the realization that few, if any, organizations will feature a single-vendor technology stack. From the use of multiple cloud providers to ensure redundancy and performance, to the best-of-breed approach to choosing productivity and collaboration applications, data will need to flow between and be surfaced within a wide range of applications and systems.
Tableau’s open-ecosystem approach is reflective of this truth in the market, and it is good to see the company is enabling partnerships with not only the large, incumbent vendors in the space but also scrappy disrupters. While there is a lot of work to be done to enable the utopian vision of being able to automatically incorporate contextually relevant insights and visualizations within the flow of work, Tableau appears to be taking the right steps to accomplish these goals within the next few quarters.
4) Tableau is working on demonstrating overall value to its customers and prospects, which it will need to amplify, particularly as other competitors try to compete on licensing fees (which do not necessarily reflect TCO).
As previously mentioned, Tableau occupies a premium position in the marketplace, particularly when evaluating it based on a single-user license basis. Similarly, in speaking with Tableau customers and customers of other competitive products, Tableau is seen as being relatively “expensive,” particularly for non-power users.
Tableau will need to demonstrate real-world, real-business value that can be derived from the use of its tools, as well as highlight the value delivered by the company, particularly around its support and implementation offerings. CEO Ryan Aytay noted that the company has refocused its efforts on providing a tiered support offering that more closely adheres to the main types of customers within the company’s user base, and I urge the company to lean into that as part of its overall value equation.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Tableau Pulse Goes GA, Uses Generative AI to Make Data More Accessible
Salesforce Introduces Generative AI-Enabled Version of Tableau
Salesforce Announces Public Beta Availability of Einstein Copilot
Image Credit: Tableau
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
