Salesforce appears increasingly worried about being pigeonholed as a CRM product and wants to ride the data wave and be seen as a data product.

I’m not sure this acquisition makes a lot of sense though. The Tableau fad seems to be fading as people realize that while it’s a nice glorified Excel it doesn’t really solve the data issues most companies have. It seems like a very high price for a product that may be past it’s peak.

That said, we’ll done to the Tableau team for having gone public and then selling the company again at a nice bump.