“Visualise to monetise with Tableau,” is the message from Peter Chizlett, Regional Vice President of Embedded Analytics at Tableau EMEA, who is helping organisations transform the way they use data.
The post-covid business landscape will see the ‘survival of the data fittest’ with those that win adopting both a data transformation and harnessing the monetisation of that data. Tableau is working with organisations to share data clearly using its intuitive self-service analytics platform which empowers users of any skill level to make game-changing data-driven decisions, solve problems and leverage insights.
“The race is on. Companies need to evolve fast to survive and thrive,” said Chizlett, speaking from his home office near London. “All organisations, large or small, have data and all of them are doing, or thinking about doing something, with that data externally. So the race is on - it's a form of digital Darwinism.”
Tens of thousands of organisations around the world, such as Charles Schwab, Verizon, Schneider Electric, Southwest Airlines and Netflix, rely on Tableau to help them, and their customers, see and understand data.
Tableau was founded in 2003 in Mountain View, California, and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In 2019 the company was acquired by Salesforce for US$15.7 billion and continues to scale its mission to help its customers see and understand data - while also focusing on R&D.
“Salesforce realised the analytics platform could give them the edge in their offerings to customers. We're already starting to see the benefits of ownership by Salesforce with Einstein Discovery being added to the Tableau platform and even more horsepower behind innovation and R&D.”
Mission to see and understand data
Tableau’s mission is to enable people to see and understand data and make decisions based on these findings.
“If you think about what came before business intelligence tools, it was typically rows and columns of numbers so it was hard to identify anomalies or opportunities,” said Chizlett who cites working with an airline that was mystified why they had an absenteeism problem.
“We worked with the airline who didn't know the problem was with scheduling until they put their data into Tableau. It revealed that the absenteeism was always on a Tuesday because the staff couldn't be rostered again until several days later if they’d phoned in sick on the Tuesday.
“This is not something they would find in a spreadsheet. They could only see this when the data was visualised - through a heat map or a graph - so that's how we help organisations. In this case it helped improve employee satisfaction by changing rostering policies, and we know employee satisfaction drives revenue and customer loyalty - which is one of many ways of monetising data, albeit indirectly.”
Another example of monetising data is used by a major online retailer in the UK that charges suppliers to access information on what items are best-sellers. “This allows suppliers to tailor their promotions, pricing and supply to all of their retailers,” said Chizlett. “This customer helps external organisations find their own insights and act upon those.”
Tivian as a customer and partner
“At Salesforce and Tableau, our number one value is trust. Together, we use our currency of trust to earn the privilege of being our customers’ guide to success in their strategic transformations,” said Chizlett. “We are only successful if they are successful. When a customer uses our products, internally our customer success experts are brilliant at helping them deploy and adopt so they get maximum value. When the user is one step away from us, we have to truly partner with our customer to ensure they are successful and their customers are successful too. One company that has been a great customer and partner since 2014 is Tivian who are very open and creative.
“We've recently started working much more proactively together as part of our Embedded Partnership Programme. This entails closer insights into the Tableau product group for Tivian, but also Tivian feeding back to our product group. They're the ones that are closest to our customers. This helps us take insights and develop our products to meet customer needs.
“Our Embedded Partner Programme also means we are agreed on business goals, things that Tivian wants to achieve. We approach those goals together to see how Tableau and Salesforce can help Tivian be successful in their markets.
“We know that by working with Tivian, we're helping an innovative partner in the world of analytics. When you consider your own product as the gold standard in analytics, as we do, that makes for a pretty good partnership.”
Competitive differentiation
Chizlett pointed out that one of the benefits of embedding analytics into either B2B portals, websites or software for customers or governments is creating competitive differentiation.
“As consumers and citizens demand more information, competitive differentiation is an essential trait. If you think back over the last 18 months, the demand for information among citizens in uncertain times was really high and it was all about being engaged, transparent and delivering value. So, not just giving citizens information, it's about giving them insights by which they can make decisions to make their lives better,” he said. “The same applies in business.
“If we look at B2B organisations, it is not just about competitive differentiation, but you also have to be able to expose or share analytics and insights with customers because that is what they are looking for no more than ever.
“For Independent Software Vendors (ISV) it's competitive differentiation again. You no longer log into an application without expecting to see some insights from the application, otherwise, many of these applications are just information repositories. Unless you get insights out of them, they're sometimes nothing more than a good place to file information. In their own right, information repositories are helpful but delivering insights from that information can be transformative for their customers.”
What is Einstein Discovery?
Powered by machine learning (ML), Einstein Discovery delivers predictions and recommendations within Tableau workflows for smarter decision-making.
“Einstein Discovery is incredibly intuitive and it's helping Tableau deliver analytics to everybody. So analytics as part of this mission will be ubiquitous. It also means that from an embedded standpoint, our customer’s customers can ask questions about the data.”
The platform allows data scientists, analysts, and business users across an organisation to create powerful predictive models without needing to write algorithms. It is a no-code environment that empowers anyone to quickly and confidently make decisions guided by ethical, transparent AI in Tableau.
It allows users to bring tomorrow into today’s decisions with just a few clicks by embedding custom predictions anywhere people can view or use Tableau. Einstein Discovery insights are integrated into your Tableau workflow, to ensure it does not disrupt analysis.
Future forecast
Chizlett said the future of embedded analytics is looking strong with a compound annual growth rate of 14% up until 2027.
“In uncertain times, people, citizens, customers, businesses are looking for data more and more to give them certainty. The pandemic has meant that many organisations have accelerated their digital transformation but this also means there has to be a data transformation.
“Every single customer has data and that data is growing. Monetising that data doesn't necessarily have to be building new products, but it can be giving yourselves competitive differentiation or business advantage through leveraging that data.
“I think solving problems and curiosity is human nature. We have more than a million members in the Tableau community who are passionate about seeing and understanding data. If you ask a question of the community around Tableau, you'll get the answer, I wouldn't say it's an Olympic sport yet, but watch out…”
Timeline of Tableau Software
Tableau was founded by Chris Stolte, Pat Hanrahan and Christian Chabot when the Department of US Defence approached the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University for a project to look at people’s ability to analyse data.
According to Peter Chizlett, Regional Vice President of Embedded Analytics , for Tableau EMEA, Stolte searched the market for tools but was disappointed. “The rest, as they say, is history… Tableau, and VizQL, the underlying engine that drives the platform, was born.
“Over the next 10 years, Stolte, Chabot and Hanrahan built out a multimillion dollar business, which IPO’d in 2013. The reason it was so successful is because there was nothing else really out there that was so user-friendly, and Tableau has always been innovating to meet the evolving needs of their users.”
In 2019 Tableau was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion which has allowed for more R&D and potential for growth.
Marc Benioff, Chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce said: "We are bringing together the world's #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform.
“Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers. It's truly the best of both worlds for our customers--bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world.”
