Hacker News Reader

Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

This seems really high for a company without earnings and a weird growth curve. Their ticker is cool and maybe sales force wants to be DATA on nasdaq.

Otherwise, it will be hard to justify this high markup for a tool company.

It will be awesome if Salesforce can adjust their model and make Tableau spit out D3. Their desktop tool is nice for designing, but their server components seem frequently unnecessary for running the visualization. The catch is that creating serverless dynamic visualizations isn’t all that money-making and the cool UI/UX design tool is outside of OSS’ wheelhouse.

View on HN

A lot of companies use Tableau to visualize their data. In the future if they want to use Tableau they (speculation) might have to host their data in SalesForce and/or be directed to use a number of other SalesForce features if they want the latest coolest dashboards. To me this acquisition seems be a play toward growing customer usage of SalesForce licensed functions and data migration to their cloud, rather than based on the current revenue stream. The lock-in is strong.

SalesForce has been pushing Einstein Analytics recently. I haven't used it, but I do see that moving an organization from Tableau to Einstein has a lot of costs involved so this would be a hard sell in many places. Having them both under one roof means they're able to bring a bunch of people across to their cloud and now that license revenue year over year is theirs with the additional data lock-in.

As someone that really dislikes vendor-forced lock-in and generally dislikes the way SalesForce controls your data, rate limits, maxes, licensing, etc, this move is about even more control up your stack that will seem like a "no brainer" to decisionmakers, which is dangerous. That said, I'm sure it will work well for some organizations.

EDIT: I would also love to see them spit out D3 or other open visual but then they'd be losing control of the secret sauce and the requirement for a license. Not sure there is an incentive to go that route.

My company is using Einstein Analytics, however, other than the Salesforce integration has been a terrible disappointing experience. Loading data is a pain and has to be done to a custom API. Of course Einstein analytics need to have it is own language called SAQL resulting in a steep learning curve.

That sounds right. This acquisition maybe gets rid of the curve there and for orgs like mine that use Tableau and SalesForce it sounds simpler / easier in future (Einstein has conversion and learning costs as you say). However, that comes with a cost - loss of any freedom to use your data without worrying about arbitrary license changes and cost. The way they structure the licensing will be interesting since they’ll have leverage over any customers.

yeah i put in another comment that this acquisition is a vote of non confidence in Einstein Analytics. You may see it phased out in the next few years.

Yeah SalesForce NEEDS Tableau. It is like a missing puzzle piece in their suite. Einstein is essentially enhanced reporting for SalesForce even though they sell it as an analytics tool.

You may want to take a look at [perspective](https://perspective.finos.org/), a WASM-based serverless dynamic visualization library with [D3FC](https://d3fc.io) charting.

Thanks, this is a good tool. There’s a few libs that spit out d3, but the UI isn’t as usable. Tableau is popular with the Excel crowd that I’ve been able to work with.

>This seems really high

Precisely what I thought. It looks like their annual revenue is ~ $1 billion, placing this price around 15x annual revenue.

However, Looker has about $131 million in revenue, so their purchase price was an even higher 20x annual revenue.

My conclusion is that these acquisitions are much less about sales revenue and much more about filling strategic holes in product offerings, and I can only assume it's a sellers market in that area.

Those strategic holes are probably worth more to the acquiring company than the price they paid in terms of new revenue.

Multiplers don't scale linearly. The lower your valuation, the more possible it is to get a higher multiple for various reasons (cash, # of bidders in the market, etc).

At $1B/year in revenue there aren't a lot of companies that can realistically acquire you. At $131MM/year, there are.

But still I agree. Both are quite high.

> Their ticker is cool and maybe sales force wants to be DATA on nasdaq.

CRM is a pretty darn good ticker for Salesforce. Why would you change it? It perfectly explains your core business

CRM is the best ticker name for salesforce. DATA works but on a different level.

CRM is a much smaller market than cloud and data.

I have worked with some companies that love Tableau so much, they use the desktop and server versions a lot. The licensing costs are high, but it does the job.

>Their ticker is cool and maybe sales force wants to be DATA on nasdaq...Otherwise, it will be hard to justify this high markup for a tool company.

You make it sound like the ticker symbol justifies a $15.7B price tag...

I didn’t intend that, but searching for reasons for such a high value.

I think we are many years away from $15B vanity ticket symbols.

A CEO of a soon to IPO company should most definitely take “AWS” as the ticker.

Because they are the clear market leader in the category, have been for a long time, only recently falling behind Microsoft. (within the last 2 years of their 20 years as a company.) Give it a year or two to integrate into Salesforce and they will be neck and neck. This is just as much a bailout to Tableau to save them from being dwarfed by Microsoft.

https://interworks.com/blog/ksloan/2019/04/03/the-2019-gartn...

Very expensive acquisition.

Perhaps in 5 years we'll look back at this move as a prime example of the bubble we're currently in.

Or maybe the begin of an even bigger wealth creation period. "And why did i not invest earlier?"

Or maybe neither, and just a weird factoid about a corporate acquisition that wasn't indicative of any larger market trends. (All possibilities now hedged).

NP complete?

Tableau has a research division they themselves acquired recently in Boston.

Last year they acuired Empirical Systems, "an eight-person artificial intelligence startup based in Cambridge, Mass" [1].

However, 'Tableau Research' [2] has existed for years and its researchers regularly publish at major academic visualisation conferences like IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST) and EuroVis (see [3]).

[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/tableau-acquires-mit-ai-spinof...

[2]: https://research.tableau.com/

[3]: https://research.tableau.com/papers

Yes but they’re not hardcore statisticians like the Empirical people except for this Daniel Ting fellow

> t will be awesome if Salesforce can adjust their model and make Tableau spit out D3

Can you clarify?

Maybe they meant salesforce's business model, which doesn't usually include outputting stuff in an open format? I'm not sure.

Sort of. Salesforce is more interested in selling cloud licenses and space. They push proprietary apps and such, but maybe they won’t care so much about hosting tableau server specifically.

Tableau worksheets and dashboards are proprietary and need either Tableau Reader on the client’s desktop or Tableau Server to run proprietary server side stuff for the js libraries to draw it. This is expensive to license their server and limited in how you can host. In many situations the data is small enough to send to the client.

It would be nice if tableau would just generate static content that could be hosted anywhere.

There’s not a client tool for d3 as nice as tableau. I work with lots of scientists who learned tableau but aren’t really programmers and can’t figure out d3 or other libraries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com