Salesforce acquires Tableau...What happens now?
For the past few months I've been wishing that the Salesforce Einstein Analytics product was available at price point that matched Tableau. Well today those wishes were, kind of answered.....
Salesforce has just announced that they are acquiring Data Analytics platform Tableau in a $15.3 Billion deal.
Salesforce has been gaining traction in data analytics since the launch of their Einstein Analytics product at Dream Force 2016, however traction has been limited to large SME's and Enterprise.
Whilst Einstein is incredibly powerful, its functionality and price point have been beyond the reach of many businesses seeking a data visualization and reporting tool. On the flip side the price point and depth of functionality of Tableau has made them a market leader across SME and Enterprise.
In my opinion, this acquisition represents the next step in the deepening of the Salesforce Platform, to offer solutions across industry, business function, entity size and technology need. Salesforce has been steadily moving from being a CRM, to a complete business platform since they launched Salesforce Lightening back in 2015.
The acquisitions and product releases since 2015 have been aimed at growing their user base on all fronts. The acquisition of Tableau opens the Salesforce Platform and Trail Blazer community to a further 86,000 Tableau users, many of whom are in the SME space.
Initially there will be very little difference to see in the operations and product functionality of Salesforce and Tableau. However, Salesforce has played this card well before with the acquisition of Quip, Mulesoft and DemandWare.
Acquire a company with market leading technology and an engaged community, in a deep technology vertical. (Collaboration, Integration, E-Commerce)
Release some native integrations to make it easier for users of the acquired company to start using Salesforce.
Make the newly aquired company the focus of that years' Dream Force to cross pollinate the Eco-systems and announce the roadmap for integration of the technology.
Pick off modules of functionality from the acquired technology and bake them into the core Salesforce product.
This is an interesting and exciting announcement for both companies, which is sure to have a few technology professionals scratching their heads in the coming days.