CRM Behemoth Salesforce Acquires Data Viz Giant Tableau | What to Expect

“Innovation in an existing company is not just the sum of great technology, key acquisitions, or smart people. Corporate innovation needs a culture that matches and supports it.” – Steve Blank

There is a lot of excitement in the air among digital pioneers with the news of the intended acquisition of Tableau by the CRM behemoth, Salesforce, in order to change the future landscape of the IT digital market.

With the world’s no. 1 CRM and no.1 analytics’ platform coming together to supercharge customers’ digital transformation, Salesforce.com is undergoing a huge transformation by shifting beyond its sales/marketing roots and going the extra mile into the on-premise software world. Last year we saw evidence of this with the $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft. And of course, recently Salesforce.com agreed to pay a massive $15 billion for Tableau Software, a leader in the fast-growing market of business intelligence.

There is incredible alignment in this deal, which shows the progress of Salesforce in its strong and effective niche. Being a leading analytics platform, Tableau will help Salesforce improve their current tools and product offerings to help organizations with sales, marketing, and customer service, which will now make “not-so-smooth sailing” for their competitors.

The Impact on Competitors

As per Gartner’s report on Analytics and BI platforms, Tableau is competing with Microsoft, ThoughtSpot, and Qlik. The data viz platform has been growing fast. According to Morningstar, for the five years ending 2018, its revenue increased by 37.8%. But at the same time Tableau expects a considerable slowdown from its five-year average growth rate. This is going to give startups a chance to speed up their growth. And by startups, we mean Palo Alto-based ThoughtSpot, which is growing faster than any other. It has now become a competitive bottleneck for business intelligence platforms.

The Impact on the Digital Era

We have learned that Salesforce is expected to play a greater role in driving digital transformation. They will enable organizations to keep a check on their business data and delve deeper insights to drive smart and cognitive decisions and accelerate innovation with customer experience. The latest report of International Data Corporation forecasted global digital transformation to reach $1.18 trillion in 2019, thus creating an incredible opportunity for Tableau and Salesforce. Salesforce can provide a complete 360-degree view across every touchpoint – be it sales, marketing, service, commerce, etc.

With Salesforce’s Einstein and Tableau together, Salesforce will also be able to deliver extremely intuitive and intelligent analytics with an icing on the cake i.e. visualization platform for each department at any organization. We believe that Salesforce’s analytics and customer 360 will be stronger with Tableau, thus enabling businesses to drive smarter decisions and improve their ROI.

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. I’m thrilled to welcome Adam and his team to Salesforce.”

We are also thrilled to see how this amazing digital transformation will affect the technology world!

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