From a small challenge posed by the US Ministry of Defense to an international platform responsible for hundreds of thousands of users, Tableau’s data visualisation capabilities have radically altered how we view, analyse, and interact with data forever. Now combined with Brytlyt’s supercharged GPU technology, Tableau is more accessible and user-friendly than ever before. But how exactly did the platform come into reality? We look at this and more of the incredible story below.
The Birth of a Platform
The story of Tableau began in 2003 with a challenge issued from the US Department of Defense aimed at increasing people’s ability to interpret and analyse information. Chris Stolte, a University of Stanford PhD candidate computer scientist, joined forces with his mentor Pat Hanrahan and entrepreneurship scholar Christian Cabot to develop the first iterations of the Tableau platform. Since then, the platform has grown immensely, with over 5,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of users globally.
The Tableau Community
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of Tableau is the thriving community that surrounds it. From sharing resources, solving issues, and hosting free webinars for personal development, the Tableau community is collaborative, creative, and driving change.
Their personal Reddit page inspires positive education and development through weekly events: Makeover Monday and Workout Wednesday. Each Monday, working with shared data sets, participants learn how to create better data visualisations, while each Wednesday participants are challenged to recreate a particular data visualisation.
This is just scratching the surface. Tableau’s annual conference invites users from all around the globe to come together to develop, learn, and meet likeminded individuals. At their last conference in 2019, there were an estimated 20,000 attendees, and these numbers are sure to only increase.
Awards, Recognition and Acquisition
Through all their work, the team at Tableau can boast an impressive portfolio of awards and accolades. From being featured as a rising star on a list of companies that are changing the world to being awarded gold in the enterprise category of Seattle Business Magazine’s 2018 tech impact awards, neither Tableau nor its community show any signs of slowing down.
In June 2019, Tableau was acquired in a $15.7 billion deal with Salesforce, the cloud-based software company operating out of San Francisco. Through the acquisition, Tableau was able to not only bring a ‘visualization boost’ to current Salesforce clients but also provide aid to any analytic use cases that may be necessary.
Commenting on the relationship between Tableau and Salesforce, Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky stated:
‘Tableau is going to continue to operate independently, inside of Salesforce under the Tableau brand. I think it’s important to a lot of our customers to know that the Tableau that they know and love, and the focus we have on the community and our users, is not going away.’
Tableau and Brytlyt
Through combining world-changing data-visualisation software with Brytlyt’s speed of thought data acceleration capabilities, users are now able to gain key insights faster than ever before. With enhanced compatibility and an emphasis on accessibility, there has never been a better time to give your team a competitive advantage.
To learn more about the future of data visualisation and the value of agile business intelligence, why not read our whitepaper?
