Aussie Salesforce partners welcome Tableau buy

Australian Salesforce partners have welcomed the company’s AU$22.5 billion acquisition of analytics and visualisation vendor Tableau.

“I think it is a great acquisition by Salesforce,” said Helen Peterson, co-founder and director of FullCRM.

“To me Salesforce is more business-focussed [and] probably something that Tableau customers, not already on the Salesforce platform, could benefit from. The cross-sell opportunities are huge.”

Tquila ANZ CEO Jo Masters’ take on the deal is that “This will be a game changer and will allow Salesforce current and future customers to see their data, understand their data and make smart decisions to offer better customer service by better understanding their customers.”

“Salesforce always make smart strategic decisions and have purchased Tableau BI to offer a bona fide enterprise reporting solution," Masters added. “It is also a strategic move to head off Microsoft big data analytics and power BI.”

Peter Breusch, the other co-founder and director of FullCRM, said “Most of our Salesforce customers work with reports and dashboards which are very good but don't have the business intelligence capabilities to really analyse and strategise”

“Salesforce's initial Wave Analytics required a high degree of technical knowledge and effort to set up, which has improved but is still seen as a 'big end' solution. Tableau's speed to set up & access multiple data sources, combined with pre-prepared industry solutions have far broader appeal.”

Tquila’s Masters said her company’s customers, and staff, are already Tableau users.

“It is a platform some of our customers use today,” she said. “It is a solution some of our consultants have used and have integrated to. Tquila will ensure we expand our capability due to this strategic move and to ensure we remain as a leading edge multi cloud partner.”