Tableau files for IPO | Hacker News Reader

Tableau files for IPO

forbes.com

32 pointsbenhamner28 comments

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Interesting stats from their S-1 (http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1303652/00011931251...):

- $127.7m 2012 revenue

- 749 full time employees at end of 2012

- 70% of revenue from product licenses; 30% from services

- 11,000 customer accounts

- No customer represented more than 5% of total revenue

thats a really really durable robust company profile. Congrats to them.

I'm not in the knowledge to evaluate company performance, but is net income of $1.6mm on $127mm revenue counts a robust company? In the last 3 years they had a similar % for net income/revenue, their employee count is linear with their revenue.

I am curious though, is 1.6mm out of 127 a bad thing or a good thing? My knowledge in this area is abysmal :) Honest question. 1.6m profit is a decent thing though after costs.

Usually company is compared with other vendors in the same industry. E.g. Qliktech (NASDAQ:QLIK) in 2012 had net income of ~3,839,000 on the revenue of ~388,537,000 which is a profit margin of 0.99% vs Tableau's 1.26%.

Unless we know what the spending is on, it's impossible to evaluate that. But good point. If the growth in spending is on sales side, then maybe so. If the growth in spending is tied to tech / product evolution and associated growth in market reach, it's a good thing probably.

It's one of those things where you can't evaluate the area of the fractal problems. You could drill in more and more, but at the end of the day it's never obvious. Or at least the biz circumstances that are obviously good or bad are kinda rare. I think.

This is an interesting view to a modern B2B sw licensing business, which is not SaaS. Their Sales & Marketing expenses are about 50% of their revenues, R&D is 25% and administration is 13%. Combined sales and admin costs are 63%. In the previous years, Sales has been a tad above 65% of their revenues and combined sales and admin costs have been above 80%. Quite a drop! What did they do?

I assume that BI tools are quite hard to sell, as they require non-trivial amount of integration to existing systems, but it is interesting to compare to this other B2B companies. For example SalesForce's combined sales and administrative costs are 78% of their revenue. Tableau's competitor QlikView has combined sales and admin costs at 75% of their revenue.

Maybe i haven't seen the insides of enough large companies - but watching their demo video, this sort of product seems to glimpse past what LtU call the 'middle-ages' of programming. Like seeing map, fold and CPS for the first time. I spend how much time writing graphs, charts, filters, sql, password reset interfaces by hand for my SaaS with my web stack?

The coolest part for me is someone here has what seems like a quite pure software gig, writing interfaces with no real need to care for the underlying business, only for the data adapters. Mostly if you're working with business software the result would be polluted by some specific business logic or domain knowledge.

(Excuse the gushing, that video blew me away slightly.)

I've used a few BI tools and it blows everything else out of the water - this is the first tool I've come across where I feel like end users could actually create the reports they want with it.

Title should be renamed to reflect that revenue is $127.7mm, thought this was going to be an article decrying the crazy valuations some tech companies get.

Whoops! Unfortunate typo. Hopefully a mod will fix

I just added the m subconsciously.

I thought the same. The scary thing I wasn't totally surprised that they planned a IPO when the revenue wasn't enough buy a iPod Touch.

    "...the idea that companies needed simpler ways to visualize big data and databases."

Maybe I'm late to the party but is "big data" now just another way of saying "data"? More and more it seems like anyone who uses a database is mixing it up with "big data".

I think big data is a bad term, the key issue is whether you're using data to drive your decision making, not how much of it you have or what storage technology your using. If you're Amazon or Facebook then, sure, you've got to crunch through many TB to get to an answer, if you're an insurance broker turning over $100m from 2000 customers then there's no way making a business decision should need more than a few SQL queries on relational databases. But saying you're into big data is now almost a shorthand for saying, we analyse our data and use that to drive our decision making.

Do companies, at this stage, announce what the IPO issuing price (or market cap) will be? If so, what is theirs? If not, any guesses what it will be?

It is not in Splunk's league, but it is definitely a solid product, with a great growth prospect.

Issue price is sort of arbitrary. Right before the Yelp IPO, they did a 4-to-1 reverse split to change the share price from $7/share to $28/share (rough numbers).

I'm currently looking into web based BI tools and have Tableau on my radar at the moment. Is splunk able to do traditional relational database reporting for business users or is the value more in IT operations? I'm googling, but finding a whole lot of handwaving.

Splunk is not able to. Check us out at chartio.com

This comes across as juvenile and shady. At least expand on it a bit.

Splunk can read/write to relational databases.

http://splunk-base.splunk.com/apps/50803/splunk-db-connect

Hey, how can I get in touch with you? I think I can help you evaluate better (and learn in the process).

Not a strength for Splunk.

I can't believe the stock symbol "DATA" wasn't taken already.

I wonder, now that a lot of stock symbols are taken, if we will see more vanity type symbols like this. Reminds me of the evolution of domain name usage.

Vanity?

DATA doesn't represent the company name, similar to the recent RIM change, a marketing/vanity piece.

Woo not a lot of Seattle IPOs!

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