Tableau’s IPO on May 17 2013 instantly created the most valuable (in terms of Market Capitalization) Data Visualization Vendor. Since then Tableau kept having the best in “BI industry” YoY growth and its sales skyrocketing, almost reaching the level of QLIK sales. During summer of 2014 DATA (stock symbol for Tableau) shares were relatively low and as one visitor to my blog cynically put it, TCC14 (Tableau Customer Conference for 2014) can be easily justified, since it raised DATA Stock and added (indirectly) to Market Cap of Tableau more than $1B to the level of more than $5B. Below is entire history of DATA prices (click on image to enlarge):
Tableau’s IPO on May 17 2013 instantly created the most valuable (in terms of Market Capitalization) Data Visualization Vendor. Since then Tableau kept having the best in “BI industry” YoY growth and its sales skyrocketing, almost reaching the level of QLIK sales. During summer of 2014 DATA (stock symbol for Tableau) shares were relatively low and as one visitor to my blog cynically put it, TCC14 (Tableau Customer Conference for 2014) can be easily justified, since it raised DATA Stock and added (indirectly) to Market Cap of Tableau more than $1B to the level of more than $5B. Below is entire history of DATA prices (click on image to enlarge):
For me the more indicative then the stock prices, market capitalization and a number of participants in customer conferences are numbers of job openings for competing vendors and Tableau has 270+ of them (more than 20% of its current number of employees), QLIK has 120+ (about 7% of its number of employees) and TIBCO has only about 2 dozens of openings related to Spotfire (unless I misread some other openings). For the quarter finished June 30, 2014, the company posted a year-over-year revenue increase of 82% with just over $90 million in revenue. Headcount was up 62% year-over-year to 1,532 employees worldwide.
As a background for Tableau growing sales (and tremendous YoY) you can see slow growth of QLIK sales (QLIK also delayed for almost 3 years the release of new product: we will not see Qlikvew 12, we still waiting for release of QLIK.NEXT and only recent release is Qlik Sense, which does not make too much sense to me) and almost no changes in Spotfire sales. I am guessing that Tableau is taking all those sales away from competition…
Keynotes and sessions of TCC14 were packed (you cannot find available seats on images below) and full of interesting info and even entertainment for new users and customers.
These 2 fresh multimillionaires (see below, not sure why Christian’s face looks unhappy – I guess it is just me) opened TCC14 as usual, with exciting keynote.
You can find their keynote either on TCC14 website (link below) or on Youtube (below TCC14 link). Keynote contains 3+ parts: two speeches from co-founders (this year Christian choose theme of “Data Art” – I am not sure if it help sales, but nevertheless entertaining and very speculative topic) and the rest of keynote about new features in upcoming release of Tableau (8.3 and 9.0?).
http://tcc14.tableauconference.com/keynote
As you see from slide below, Tableau is positioning new features in 7 groups, and I will try to mention those.
Let’s start with most interesting to me: potential performance gain 2x or even 4x, mostly because better usage of multithreading and 64-bit code and I quote here: “Vice President of Product Development Andrew Beers takes his turn next, speaking about Performance. He shows breakthroughs in the Viz Engine, flying through a visualized painting, seamlessly panning, zooming, and selecting. Switching into data more likely to be representative, he shows a live connection to a database of 173 million taxi rides in New York City, and dives in showing results easily four times faster than the same calculations run on the same machine running Tableau 8.2, leveraging a change in the Data Engine to use multiple CPU cores in parallel. Database queries will likewise be parallelized, with cited examples reducing 15 second queries to three, and more complex ones reduced from nearly a minute to as little as seven seconds.”
Among other features, Chris introduced “Lasso & Radial Selections”: these selections allow interactors to select points in shapes other than just a square. In Stolte’s keynote, he used a map as an example. He only wanted to lasso points in a city from the northwest to the southeast, not selecting some along the way. The shape ended up being like a figure eight. This was impressive.
Vice-President of Product Marketing Ellie Fields talked about new developments forthcoming in Cloud computing with Tableau, featuring Tableau Online as a platform for connecting Cloud data warehouses and applications in conjunction with on-premise data which can be presented in web browsers, on mobile devices, or even encapsulated in embedded applications.
Of course the star of TCC14 was Prof. Hans Rosling – as keynoter as well as part of the excited crowd.
Hans stars even in cafeteria (could not resist to include his picture seating at table with right hand raised).
Another memorable event was “ZEN Masters of 2014” –
this is a living prove of huge and very capable Tableau community
Tableau provided during TCC14 a lot of classes and training sessions – almost all of them were well prepared and packed. Expect many of them to be available online – many for free.
I included below two video interviews, showing insider’s take on Tableau as Sales Organization
and also Tableau’s approach to Product management with these priorities (I am curious if they always followed in real life): Quality – Schedule – Features.
Data Visualization 
September 17, 2014 at 9:14 pm
Well done my friend – Larry
September 19, 2014 at 10:02 am
Andrei, Thanks for including Qlik in your post. There are a number of points that I did want to address.
First, in regards to your comments “slow growth of QLIK sales”. In FY2013 Qlik’s annual revenue grew 21% to $470.5 million. Is 21% on a higher revenue base slow? We don’t believe it is.
Second, “we will not see Qlikvew 12, we still waiting for release of QLIK.NEXT and only recent release is Qlik Sense.”
“QlikView.Next” was simply a project name. The output of that project is in fact Qlik Sense which is now generally available. See the press release at http://www.qlik.com/us/company/press-room/press-releases/2014/en/0917-qlik-launches-full-qlik-sense-product.
QlikView 12 (i.e., a new release of QlikView) is planned for release next year. Again, thanks for including Qlik and for your continued interest in our company and products.
Best, John Callan
Sr. Director, Global Product Marketing
September 20, 2014 at 1:26 am
Dear John: glad to hear from my old friend!
1. YES, 21% YoY is a very good rate of growth for everybody except for QLIK and Tableau, but when I said “slow” I referred to a much better YoY rate Tableau is still demonstrating now and QLIK had in the recent past.
2. So far not too many people said that QLIK.NEXT will never will be delivered under that name and QLIK Sense is the replacement name for it. QLIK’s website still has pages about QlikView.Next referring to it as a Product, see it here: http://www.qlik.com/next/our-vision.html .
Multiple people from Qliktech told me before that the main client for Qlik.Next will be HTML5 client and I expected that as oppose to Qlik Sense Desktop you originally delivered – it was another reason I thought Qlik.Next still a valid name.
3. You are the first person telling me that Qlikview 12 will be delivered as a product. Again, multiple people from Qlik told us that Qlikview 11.2 is the end of the line and will be supported for 3 years but will be replaced by Qlik.Next (and nobody mentioned before that Qlikview 12 will be released or Qlik.Next is not the name of the product but merely name of the PROJECT) or as now it appears by Qlik Sense.
4. As an observation: the release of Qlikview 12 after 4 years since releasing Qlikview 11 seems as a low rate of innovation and it may indirectly contribute to lower YoY growth rate (of Qlik) compare to what we saw from QLIK in past…
It seems that QLIK did not communicate properly (if even me confused) of what is going on and about changes in its naming conventions and plans… I used info shared publicly by QLIK.