Salesforce, Inc. is a global software provider in the customer relationship management (CRM) area. Founded in 1999, the vendor aims to enable companies of all sizes and industries to connect with their customers through the power of data, AI, CRM and trust. Salesforce offers its products via its own public cloud infrastructure – Hyperforce.
Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in 2019 and supplies Salesforce customers with analytics today. Founded in 2003, Tableau emerged from scientific research at Stanford University. The company has achieved strong growth and is now among the best-known BI & analytics platforms and brands worldwide.
Tableau’s AI-powered BI & analytics platform aims to provide better insights in data and empower better decision-making in all industries. The vendor strives to develop software that allows business users, analysts and developers to explore and analyze data through interactive visualizations, natural language queries and data preparation. The built-in intelligence and option for in-memory data processing to optimize performance all contribute to the popularity of this solution for visual analysis, dashboards and data discovery. The product offers solid support for analysts with various features such as one-click analyses, AI-generated summaries and data explanations as well as highlighting anomalies in data.
Tableau’s flexibility and openness to a variety of data sources is one of its strengths, as it is not necessary to rehost data to use Tableau. The solution allows users to query data live from different data sources, to combine data from across these sources, or to move the data into its own ‘Hyper’ in-memory database for analysis. To ensure performance, Tableau optimizes live queries to generate the most efficient SQL and converts it to source-native dialect. Moreover, to reduce data movement, the product utilizes pushdown optimizations and its federated query cost-based optimizer. The vendor aims to do processing as close to the data as possible, even across different sources.
Data preparation in Tableau can be quick as many manipulations can be made directly while analyzing data, enabling a truly iterative approach to data discovery. With Tableau Prep, data preparation has been enhanced with deeper functionality and a more visual approach with recommendations for data shaping, profiling and enhanced traceability. Tableau Prep transformation flows can be created either on the desktop or in the browser via Tableau Cloud and may be scheduled and orchestrated on the server or hosted environment to operationalize data preparation tasks. Data science scripts such as R and Python can be dynamically integrated into Tableau’s data preparation and analysis features.
With the rise of GenAI, the vendor has invested in a next-generation product called Tableau Agent, which has a broader scope and acts as a successor to its natural language offering ‘Ask Data’, which was recently retired. Tableau Agent leverages Salesforce’s Einstein Trust Layer, a secure intermediary for user interactions with LLMs that masks personally identifiable information (PII), checks output toxicity, ensures data privacy and ensures that customer data is never stored outside of Salesforce and never retained by the foundation model provider for any purpose. A second, already available GenAI offering is Tableau Pulse, aimed at helping customers focus on metrics and therefore make data-driven decisions. Pulse is equipped with AI functionality to guide users to needed insights and assist in interpreting them. In addition, the predictive and prescriptive AI capabilities of Salesforce’s Einstein Model Builder have been integrated with Tableau to provide advanced predictions and recommended next best actions.
Tableau is just one part of Salesforce’s overall offering. Salesforce aims to provide its customers with a 360-degree view of customers’ data and has therefore created the Salesforce Platform, which runs on Hyperforce. From a product perspective, this offering brings together Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, as well as Slack, Tableau and MuleSoft. The single modules are offered as integrated fabric with unified metadata and data. Data Cloud is focused on activating customer data, both inside and outside of Salesforce, which means mapping customers’ data to the Salesforce data model and therefore turning it into native objects in Salesforce applications. Tableau has begun migration to Hyperforce and will complement the Salesforce Platform with analytics. All Tableau Cloud customers will be migrated to Hyperforce by the end of 2024.
Tableau also recently announced Tableau Einstein, a new iteration of Tableau fully built on the Salesforce Platform and featuring Agentforce. This new offering aims to provide a reimagined analytics experience that accelerates the path from raw data to insights by infusing autonomous and assistive agents into every aspect of analytics to help every user to answer, engage and act on insights directly from where they work in real time.
