I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases.
Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and ask them what they use for analysis and if they say "Good Data" or "MicroStrategy", I know my job will be a pain in the ass to get done. Its as if you're interviewing for an engineering job and they say "oh we all use NotePad here". Its night and day in terms of productivity.
I don't know what this means in terms of the stock, but all I can say is that I vouch for the product and think it has a lot of room to grow (from a BI perspective).
The only thing that is worse than an expensive product, is one that has unpredictable pricing.
While Tableau performance is a thing that people debate, its a non-issue. Generally, the data analyst produces a report that is consumed by 1-10 people and if that consumption grows >10, then the organization will "productize" the report by putting engineering resources on it and build something custom with HighCharts or D3.
Huh? Just write a view or a stored procedure and point Tableau at that. There's no need to compose a query in the Tableau interface.
Tableau isn't SAP, it just isn't. If they want to really get into businesses, then they need to be sensible and give people the opportunity to use it and then get it into the businesses they work in.
For instance, I used Tableau to learn it for the 15 days they gave me, and I learned quite a lot as they have great documentation, but then after the 15 days I got no more opportunities to go through their tutorials. Partially I got busy on other things and wanted to revisit it after a few days, but I also setup SQL Server SSAS which took me a bit of time. I got a maximum of about 5 days usage, after that there's no point having it on my workstation as it's far too expensive for me to justify buying a copy.
If I could have had more time with the product, I guess I'd know how good it is so I can recommend it to the business I work at. Unfortunately, I can't without cracking their trial limit code, which I'm just not prepared to do. For now, I guess I'll be recommending Qlikview which is a known quantity and very good also, though nowhere near as intuitive.
IBM has chosen to display "Analytics" as a major piece of their company. Presumably they want investors to think this could generate billions of dollars in revenue yearly. Worst case scenario for me would be IBM to buy Tableau, but clearly for those of us who use it, Tableau is one of the best tools out there for what it does. Will it be able to keep its marketshare 5 years out? Who knows.
What does Tableau offer that I can not quickly set up in either Mondrian coupled with a frontend like Saiku or Pentaho or eg. R and a Shiny server?
However, in the difference, the admin stack with ELK, Riemann, Graphite, InfluxDB, Airbrake, Icinga and whatever else assumes that 30% of the information right now is worth more than 100% of the information 3 weeks later. You know, my application port is closed, first level support is getting hell, I need any available information right now.
On the other hand, the full data warehouse/tableau stack assumes that 100% of the information is more valuable than anything else. Good DWH-Guys and their analysts can do very awesome data voodoo, predictions and analysis, and the admin stack won't be able to reproduce most of that. It just takes 2 month of data collection and 2 - 3 weeks of analysis to get the result of that grand voodoo. And Tableau can automate that voodoo after it's been done once.
Some clever stuff they had was (early-RoR-style) guessing of data semantics based on heuristics (Column labeled "date"? probably worth grouping by months. Number pairs like -0.3242,0.12345 ? probably worth plotting on a map).
I have used trial and educational versions in the past and was always pretty impressed with the ease of use and the results. The product itself was > $1k so I never actually purchased a license.
Even though I didn't follow the strategy very closely, from what I've run into it seems lke their offerings were all over the place. I saw a local newspaper using a hosted Tableau product to display data visualizations on their pages (the kind of visualizations made by a company whose DNA is desktop apps, so kind of underwhelming). Their website is all about Gartner and enterprisey lingo.
The product itself is, well, some advanced version of Excel. This means you either sell a lot of it very cheap, or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter. Too bad it seems to not be working.
I'm honestly sad to see them do badly as I think the product was really innovative and it really changed my way of thinking about report building and analytics tools.
Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart" features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automatically choosing what kind of graph to make) they will have nothing to stand on.
I'm just waiting for the street to realize that Hortonworks and their competitors also have zero moat, and if anything, a GUI interface for a Hadoop cluster is value subtraction in the age of devops.
In the BI market, Tableau is very much one of the low-cost, high volume players. They've done a great job getting into lots of people's hands, the question has always been whether or not they can roll the volume of cheap(ish) single user licenses into large enterprise-type deals.
The problem for us is that as a consulting house, our staff turnover rate is high (as expected I suppose), and this doesn't work well with Tableau's named license model. We've run into troubles where we reassigned licenses after people either left projects using Tableau, or left our company altogether. They ended up forcing us to buy extra licenses, which I was unhappy with.
My stance since then has been to avoid buying more licenses. We're getting our team skilled up more on web-based viz, so we can reduce our dependence on desktop applications.
It would be great if it just stayed as a better version of the excel chart maker. Instead, it was seen in my company as a way to replace programmers. All of these types of applications have the same flaws:
They sell a dream that you can turn a complex task that requires experts, into a simple task that anyone can do. In reality, you either have a simple application that doesn't do much, or an extremely complex application that still doesn't offer the performance and flexibility of just using an expert.
You end up creating a programming via drag and drop application that is more complicated to learn than actual programming. You replace general programmers with useless tableau specialists.
It took the tableau experts weeks to do what a programmer could do in days when complex requirements came up. Most requirements were complex.
Tableau Server is very, very slow and requires massive resources to run.
Tableau had to run the full, unfiltered query so that it could generate filter lists with all of the possible options. This query was often too large to run.
I tried to buy the desktop app a few months ago and just got bogged down with the sales guy. They tried to sell the server products (with very high per-user pricing) when all I needed was 1 desktop licence and the free viewer.
It was difficult to work out if they were a consultancy, a service, or selling a product. I think those things are in conflict with one another and make it difficult to understand the level of commitment and risk.
They are/were extremely popular with many sales organizations for internal dashboarding and even some media outlets used their stuff for public websites.
Sad to see this state of things for them, as the product was true good at one point. That said, I have not touched it in 3-4 years, so not sure how competitive it is now.
If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved.
-- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.
I have limited experience with it (only POCs), but I liked it very much.
They usually figure well in Gartner rankings
Searching "tableau" in Google stills shows their website as well as a large knowledge graph on the right hand side which tells you exactly what the company is about. There's News results at the top of the page, but there's still plenty of information, including the company website, on the first page of results.
unicorn slaughter.
upside: expect house prices in the SF bay area to become more affordable.
Until the Chinese peg falls, I don't think you can. I mean, aren't SF house prices driver by Chinese investors about as much as by domestic Twitter millionaires?
Tableau is not, LinkedIn P/E is north of 1000.
But being profitable, that is just crazy talk.
Keep plugging at building great software that actually helps make this a better place. Charge for it so you can survive this downturn. It's a cycle, this will weed out the nonsense.
That's not to say we're not due a correction.
[1]: http://biz.yahoo.com/research/earncal/20160204.html
[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/business/economy/jobs-repo...
[3]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets-idUSKCN0VE0...
Jim Cramer, et al are saying that it's the strength of the jobs report that is hurting. Because as long as unemployment is ~5% the Federal reserve might raise rates, opposed to if unemployment worsens, the fed might not.
A few things in the above explanaiton aren't completely consistent...
You're not a VC if your money is in publicly-traded firms.
VCs cannot just sell public stock on a whim, these things are scheduled far in advance and can only happen during trading windows.
Answer: We want someone stable! Not some crazy hacker. Plus if we don't spend the cash, we don't have it in our budget next year.
Oh, I get it now. :-)
Unless your queries are very simple, you are better off finding a programmer and asking them to do your job.
By your logic, there's no need to use MS Word, people should just use TeX.
This took me literally 5 minutes in tableau, I would hate to see how long this would take you writing code.
..Just the tip of the example iceberg.
Anyone with any experience in drag and drop applications will tell you that once things get complex, it ends up taking much more time using the simple drag and drop solution as you spend all of your time trying to get it to do something that is outside of a basic drag and drop model.
That's a lot of money for a business report.
https://plot.ly/javascript/ http://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/
What really exacerbated their issue was that they didn't get out in front of this and let people know how bad they were going to miss. So when they released earnings everything went to shit on them.
I can't really find any excuse for this that passes Occam's razor except to assume this is a very rookie CFO /CEO combo in charge.
I made a comment about 3 months ago saying that 2010-2014 were very kind to new tech IPO's and 2016 would be the year that companies would have to either make money or face the consequences.
I'm following this over the next 2 weeks to see what the stock does. Its now a pretty good Pre-Merger Arbitrage(take over candidate) candidate.
- Market cap under 5 Billion, check
- Institutional owner ship > 50%, check
- Insiders hold less than 5% of the company, check,in fact its at 1.09%, wow, management doesn't even want to own the company!
- below its IPO price, not yet, that was $31 but its still falling.
Maybe the people buying yesterday didn't expect poor results. Or at least they expected the kind of poor results that would make the stock go up. Definitely it did come out "a bit worse" that they predicted.
Privately disclosing them is different, Message me if you want numbers.
Also their growth is down.
Your friendly neighborhood tax agency is a special case of firm, which can commit to paying you money in the future. One way they can do this is, when you lose money in year N, they can let you carry that loss forward for up to X years, so that when you're taxed on your income in year N+3 you might be able to offset some of that income with the loss you made years earlier, reducing the amount of tax you incur.
The guesstimated value of that offset in taxes is your tax asset. If your marginal rate is 30%, and you can offset $1 million in revenue, the implied value is +/- $300k. Importantly, if you guesstimate poorly or your friendly local tax agency decides to change rules on you in the interim, you have to adjust the value on your balance sheet. This can be problematic if the tax asset is a material portion of your notional value.
For example, companies will calculate depreciation on their capital assets using various methods. However the IRS/CRA have their own methods for calculating depreciation on these assets. The difference between these two amounts can create a deferred income tax liability or asset. That is, if you record depreciation higher than what the IRS calculates as, the income tax expense you record on your income statement will be higher than the amount you are actually charged.
There are also rules which identify whether or not companies can put a deferred tax asset on their balance sheet. Under International Accounting Standards (IFRS), companies must establish that they can realize these assets by having sufficient income to apply them against in the future. In the U.S., as was the case here, a valuation allowance was applied to decrease the asset as they indicated that they weren't likely going to have a sufficient net income in future periods to apply that asset to tax expenses.
Anyways I'm a bit rough on it as while I've got an education in accounting it's not my day-to-day job anymore. Additionally I'm not that familiar with U.S. accounting standards
I am not an accountant, here's a likely better explanation: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deferredtaxasset.asp
My exp with tableau was always that they obfuscate the final query...
Fuck that.
Looker doesn't && they even allow a meta Lang on top of them.
So for you to say "just do X" leaves many less sophisticated orgs left in the dark.
So my comment is both:
Fuck their position and yours.
I don't want to pay bullshit fees to tableau (with perf hits) && not be able to see the final query && not need an actually fairly highly competent DBA to know that x+x+x needs to be enabled in order for me to get to root.
If I pay service X give me the full fucking understanding as to how service results are generated.
(Yes yes I do understand how saas blah blah works and I'm just saying I personally find this process bullshit and immoral)
"Tableau confirms big Kirkland expansion, plans to hire 1,000"
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/tableau-conf...
https://www.google.com/finance?q=fireeye&ei=weS0VunZONbcsAHQ...
Disclaimer: I have a position in NEWR and added today at the 21 level. This will certainly bounce back in the comings months or years. Will add if the irrationality continues.
You might be right who knows, but can't realy say the fear on this stock is irrational at the moment, imho
And New Relic shuts down their Seattle office: http://www.geekwire.com/2016/new-relic-shuts-seattle-office-...
AppDynamics, their direct competitor, is a late stage VC Unicorn ($2 bio evaluation) and delays its IPO.
Dynatrace another rather old-school competitor (like CA), which was bought out of Compuware by Thomas Bravo (private investor), has been taken private.
New Relic depends on smb sales, AppDynamics and Dynatrace more on enterprise sales. New Relic has the easier to use product, AppDynamic and Dynatrace are better at enterprise bullshit bingo and show more "nested pages" with often less detailed data to hide that they have worse/lacking insight. They stopped innovating like 2 years ago.
All three companies have a lot of employees and burn through their capital. Doesn't look good.
- Beyond simple queries, it becomes more easier to setup a view or two behind Tableau than to do it purely in Tableau. E.g. multiple level of latest times, more complex aggregations etc are more easily done in SQL than via Tableau.
- For some things Tableau doesn't do what we typically expect. Couple of examples:
- If you run a custom query joining two tables with some of the column names being same in both, Tableau cannot deal with it. Setting alias for columns using "as" works fine in SQL so I think it is not unreasonable to expect that to work.
- I recently tried to chart lag in request/response in microseconds. The data is stored as TIMESTAMP in our Vertica database. However, I found that Tableau doesn't show time more granular than seconds. That is kind of odd in today's common low-latency high-performance technology environment
Having said that, I really like the features it offers viz. Calculated fields which don't go away just because I change the data source, drag-and-drop dashboard constructions, very nice visualizations etc.
If it's for analysis why not use python or R, way more powerful and full of tools & libraries that give you speed you need?
If it's for reporting, why not to use chartio, looker or anything that connects directly to your db?
My opinion: If you know some python or R, you might still need chartio, looker and similar but Tableau doesn't make sense anymore.
Analysis --> Ipython
No room for Tableau and similar.
For ad hoc analysis instead, there is really nothing more powerful than R or python and it's plenty of tools & libraries that give you the speed you need.
A) Its sales team sells it as an end-to-end analytics suite, but in nearly all actual implementations I've seen companies just use it for management to view a dashboard... essentially just a slightly fancier version of the Excel doc some analyst used to mail out
B) It's crazy expensive for what it is
C) If the company has actual data scientists onboard then those individuals can do far better analysis just using free open source tools
For the above reasons and more I've seen a lot of large companies that are far less excited by Tableau than they were a year or two ago. They've either halted larger roll outs that were planned or just moved away from the platform entirely. That leads to softer sales and slams the brakes on growth rates... hence why the stock has tanked. There's also the issue of valuation multiples against their financials which are also still frothy, even after the latest downward movement in the stock.
Anybody comparing typical open source or low cost BI solutions favorably to Tableau hasn't used it, or doesn't value their own time. Tableau is easy and deep.
Tableau's board needs to attack their out-of-control cost of sales (the pay-me-everything egos), and hopefully ignore the internet idiot mob effect on their stock price.
I don't own Tableau stock. I just like the product.
Nice enough software, but a sleazy organisation. Use one of the other good alternatives.
Seems like quite the correction for an earnings beat and the removal of a ~50M deferred tax asset though, especially since people already had negative expectations before the earnings release.
Software eats the world and the education system. It's becoming increasingly easy to find developers. https://gh-prod-ruby-images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/image/f...
To some extent, companies might be trying to use too much data? Who knows.
Life Time Value capture in the analytics space is sufficiently difficult. Let's say you're an analytics customer:
Early stage customer: Use any one of the 100 integrations analytics companies listed on segment.com's website. You DO NOT need to track hundreds of parameters. Conversations with customers have 100x the value of tracking the small things at this stage....usually.
Mid-Stage Customer: Maybe you choose one of the 100 companies that makes the most sense. You start paying for it.
Having these early and midstage companies as customers is tough. The vast majority of them fail.
Big Customer: SnowPlow Analytics? Splunk? Tableau?
That being said, I think there's businesses to be built, but only semblances of unicorns and minotaurs.
15,000 web and mobile apps are coming out tomorrow. What % of them are analytics related applications? (Hint: A larger one than you might think). Just have a gander at the applications that are listed on promotehour.com and startuplister.com's list of app launch sites. There's now 100+ launch sites.
To win big in VC money, you have to take risks, the analytics space seems well established with a slew of best practices that are extremely well known. Ie. not risky enough to warrant pouring VC-istan money into.
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-m...
