Tableau 8.1 announced, 8.2 to follow

Today Tableau Customer Conference 2013 started with 3200+ attendees from 40+ countries and 100+ industries, with 700 employees of Tableau, 240 sessions. Tableau 8.1 pre-announced today for release in fall of 2013, also version 8.2 planned for winter 2014, and Tableau 9.0 for later in 2014.

Update 9/10/13: keynote now is available recorded and online:  http://www.tableausoftware.com/keynote
(Recorded Monday Sept 9, 2013 Christian Chabot, Chris Stolte and the developers LIVE)

New in 8.1: 64-bit, Integration with R, support for SAML, IPV6 and External Load Balancers, Copy/Paste Dashboards and worksheets between workbooks, new Calendar Control, own visual style, including customizing even filters, Tukey’s Box-and-Whisker Box-plot, prediction bands, ranking, visual analytics for everyone and everywhere (in the cloud now)

Planned and new for 8.2: Tableau for MAC, Story Points (new type of worksheet/dashboard with mini-slides as story-points), seamless access to data via data connection interface to visually build a data schema, including inner/left/right/outer visual joins, beautifying columns names, easier metadata etc, Web authoring enhancements (it may get into 8.1: moving quick filters, improvement for Tablets, color encoding.) etc.

8.1:  Francois Ajenstat announced: 64-bit finally (I asked for that for many years) for server processes and for Desktop, support for SAML (single-sign-ON on Server and Desktop), IPV6, External Load Balancers:

8.1: Dave Lion announced R integration with Tableau:

8.1: Mike Arvold announced “Visual Analytics for everyone”, including implemention of famous Tukey’s Box-and-Whisker Box-plot (Spotfire has it for a while, see it here: http://stn.spotfire.com/stn/UserDoc.aspx?UserDoc=spotfire_client_help%2fbox%2fbox_what_is_a_box_plot.htm&Article=%2fstn%2fConfigure%2fVisualizationTypes.aspx ),

better forecasting, prediction bands, ranking, better heatmaps:

8.1: Melinda Minch announced “fast, easy, beautiful”, most importantly copy/paste dashboards and worksheets between workbooks, customizing everything, including quick filters, new calendar control, own visual style, folders in Data Window etc…

8.2: Jason King pre-announced the Seamless access to data via data connection interface to visually build a data schema, including inner/left/right/outer “visual” joins, beautifying columns names, default formats, new functions like DATEPARSE, appending data-set with new tables, beautifying columns names, easier metadata etc.

8.2: Robert Kosara introduced Story Points (using new type of worksheet/dashboard with mini-slides as story-points) for new Storytelling functionality:

Here is an example of Story Points, done by Robert:

8.2: Andrew Beers pre-announced Tableau 8.2 on MAC and he got a very warm reception from audience for that:

Chris Stolte proudly mentioned his 275-strong development team, pre-announced upcoming Tableau Releases 8.1 (this fall), 8.2 (winter 2014) and 9.0 (later in 2014) and introduced 7 “developers” who (see above Francois, Mike, Dave, Melinda, Jason, Robert and Andrew) discussed during this keynote new features (feature list is definitely longer and wider that recent “innovations” we saw from Qlikview 11.2 and even from Spotfire 5.5):

Christian Chabot opening keynote today… He said something important: current BI Platforms are not fast, nor easy, they are not beautiful and not for anyone and they are definitely not “anywhere” but only in designated places with appropriate IT personnel (compare with Tableau Public, Tableau Online, Tableau free Reader etc.) and it is only capable to produce a bunch of change requests from one Enterprise’s department to another, which will take long time to implement with any SDLC framework.

Christian basically repeated what I am saying on this blog for many years, check it here https://apandre.wordpress.com/market/competitors/ : traditional BI software (from SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microstrategy and even Microsoft cannot compete with Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire) is obsolete and dying and this is very direct challenge and threat to BI vendors (I am not sure if they understand that): your (BI that is) time is over and now it is time for Tableau (also for Qlikview and Spotfire but they are slightly behind now…).

Update on 11/21/13: Tableau 8.1 is available today, see it here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/new-features/8.1 and Tableau Public 8.1 is available as well, see it here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/11/tableau-public-81-launches-2226