Tableau Software: Best-in-class Data Visualization Software

Christian Chabot, Chairman & Co-founder

The data driven world has seen an exponential growth in the volume of data generated today. The growing smartphone penetration in the world has directly resulted in a massive increase in the data being generated. According to researchers, the global mobile data traffic grew 63 percent in 2016 and reached 7.2 exabytes per month at the end of 2016. Data also comes from untapped, unstructured information from the web such as imagery, social media channels, news feeds, emails, journals, blogs, images, sounds, and videos. There has been a mind-boggling amount of growth in social-networking data in the past three years. In order to stay ahead in the market, organizations need to harness this data, analyze it, and turn into actionable insights. They also must be able to work with data, draw well-reasoned inferences from it, and effectively communicate their discoveries to broader audiences in order to thrive in this environment. In the early 21st century, organizations lacked the ability to use data effectively. What held them from becoming true data-driven businesses was absence of data analytics skills among employees. But the development of a simple and user friendly tool, Tableau, revolutionized the way people use data today. Tableau has built a visual language which lets people interact, navigate, explore, discover, and be curious with data naturally.

With a visionary idea and pioneering the concept of ‘visual analytics’, Chris Stolte, Pat Hanrahan, and Christian Chabot from Stanford University started the company in 2003. Christian Chabot, CEO, Tableau states, “Our software aims to wrest business intelligence from the grip of specialists and hand it to a broad swath of business users, providing the tools to tap data stores and explore them visually by clicking and dragging instead of entering complex queries.” Through Tableau, businesses can connect to the data that they require, be it a spreadsheet, database or big data. With the help of Tableau, businesses can also access data warehouses, cloud applications, and cloud data bases and easily combine data from multiple sources in few clicks. Tableau brings the data of businesses together in one simple view.

The software also allows its clients to opt for a fully hosted solution like Tableau Online, or to manage their own Tableau Server on-premises and on cloud. While analyzing data in Tableau Desktop, businesses can transform their data into powerful interactive dashboards. All the development activities from creating reports, charts, formatting, and compiling them in a dashboard is done on Tableau Desktop. And further, this dashboard can be securely shared with Tableau Online or Tableau Server so that everyone in the organization can access it from a browser, tablet or phone.