Last week we learned of the acquisition of Tableau, a leading company in the Business Intelligence (BI) market, by Salesforce. Apart from the astronomical figures being considered in the operation, it is interesting to understand the consequences of this acquisition in the world of Marketing and how the panorama changes.
Those of us who work in the Salesforce environment on a daily basis are used to receiving news of acquisitions (or acquisition attempts). Salesforce’s latest acquisition was another analytics company called Datorama and was announced in late 2018. It is no secret that Salesforce is trying to grow through acquisitions and there are numerous rumors that Salesforce itself was negotiating to take over the social network LinkenIn, a deal that was eventually taken over by its rival Microsoft.
Tableau Salesforce: Gaining Market Share
But going back to Tableau: does it make any sense for Salesforce? Especially since you’ve already made the purchase of two other analytics firms, such as Wave and Datorama. In short, Salesforce has made the purchase of three analytics companies. Wave has become the analytics cloud by changing its product name to Einstein Analytics, Datorama will become part of the Marketing Cloud, and Tableau is still not sure how it will fit into the platform.
To understand this last move, I think it makes much more sense if we think that, as with the Mulesoft acquisition, the purchase of Tableau Salesforce offers the possibility of having a greater presence in all types of business intelligence processes within companies. It seems that Salesforce is challenging Microsoft and trying to gain ground within the companies’ backoffice.
According to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, “Tableau helps people see and understand data, Salesforce helps people see and understand customers. This is another step in achieving Salesforce’s goal of a 360-degree view of the customer.
Another point to keep in mind is that Tableau is not just a cloud solution, much of its solutions are kept on premise (on the customer’s premises). This strategy diverges from Salesforce’s fundamental principle of being a cloud solution.
In short, Salesforce is clearly gaining a huge market share in the business intelligence segment, and with the acquisition of Tableau, Salesforce is positioned as a strong competitor to Microsoft PowerBI or Qlik View.
The ability to integrate joint analytics of all digital assets and marketing cloud campaigns into Tableau is a complete solution for a marketing or business department.
If you want to learn more about Salesforce’s analytics solutions, we will soon be holding a webinar/demo on Einstein Analytics. If you want to book your place, please send us an email to info@showerthinking.com with the subject ‘Demo Einstein Analytics’.
