Tableau stock down almost 50%

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ADATA

by sideband • 10 years ago

426 363 10 years ago

google.com

sitkack• 10 years ago

Devops everywhere celebrate.

mrfusion• 10 years ago

Why?

andrewvc2• 10 years ago

If you've ever run tableau server, you know why.

pinaceae3• 10 years ago

huge corrections under way, guarantee this is not the end, just the beginning.

unicorn slaughter.

upside: expect house prices in the SF bay area to become more affordable.

ap222133• 10 years ago

Doubtful - if global investors aren't putting their money into stocks, they'll just continue to buy up real estate.

pinaceae3• 10 years ago

Once you take the crazy money out of the equation, the SF Bay Area is not that appealing as a pure real estate play.

jonknee5• 10 years ago

With such rose colored glasses you should become a real estate agent. Always a good time to buy!

dageshi• 10 years ago

I'm not so sure about that, a lot of the conditions previously supporting real estate investment have given way. Oil's down, China is volatile, interest rates have risen, arguably you could say the trend could reverse due to people who previously bought as investments needing their money back.

tomp2• 10 years ago

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?

rhino369• 10 years ago

It's probably supported by both. But if prices fall, that could lead to Chinese abandoning the market and dropping prices further.

tomcam• 10 years ago

Correct. Cash real estate purchases by Chinese nationals will continue to dwarf those of Silicon Valley employees.

tootie• 10 years ago

Tableau and LinkedIn aren't exactly early-stage startups. They have pretty established businesses.

pinaceae3• 10 years ago

An established business should be self-sustaining, hence profitable.

Tableau is not, LinkedIn P/E is north of 1000.

But being profitable, that is just crazy talk.

deadlycrayon• 10 years ago

True, but the performance of your neighbors affects investors' attitudes in general.

ljk• 10 years ago

Does this affect big companies like Alphabet/Amazon/FB/Microsoft, etc?

itslennysfault• 10 years ago

...but Tableau is in Seattle.

walker77345• 10 years ago

The additional 18k people that Amazon apparently plans to hire will probably keep the Seattle market hot for the foreseeable future. Also, Chinese investors.

frik4• 10 years ago

It's the dot-com bubble all over again. Look at the NEWR stock chart, it looks like the dot-com burst in 2000-2001 compressed to a few months. It's happening a lot faster now, then it happened back then.

tjpd2• 10 years ago

"Tableau Software tumbled 36% after management warned it was unlikely to realize benefits of certain tax assets. The news sent shares spiralling despite the software company's better-than-expected quarter. The company earned 33 cents a share, more than double estimates."

Also their growth is down.

jsprogrammer• 10 years ago

What is a tax asset?

ohyes• 10 years ago

It's basically when you can claim that you operated at a loss in a given year and for tax purposes carry over that loss to a different year. This lets you pay less taxes in a year when you actually make profits.

I am not an accountant, here's a likely better explanation: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deferredtaxasset.asp

femto1133• 10 years ago

Usually it was a loss in an earlier period that you've rolled forward to offset profits in a later period. They can expire though, so if you don't make a profit in time they become worthless. Companies carry them as an asset on their books until one or the other happens.

patio112• 10 years ago

Suppose hypothetically that you have an agreement from a firm to pay you money in the future. That agreement is carried on your business' books as an asset.

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.

cavilatrest• 10 years ago

To add-on to previous commenters, they're usually the result of discrepancies between how taxes are actually charged, and how they're calculated for financial statement purposes.

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

jetcata• 10 years ago

Atlassian is currently down 23%.

sideband• 10 years ago

Splunk is down about the same today as well: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ASPLK

chinathrow• 10 years ago

FireEye is down 10% too.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=fireeye&ei=weS0VunZONbcsAHQ...

bbcbasic2• 10 years ago

Oh well. Tonight I'm gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine

headgasket2• 10 years ago

Linkedin is down 38%. Tesla is down quite a bit. My guess is that some VCs were leveraged and had to liquidate positions. Free money from leverage does not look as good when equities go down... I think we are heading for a most violent year on the markets. Pharma and biothechs will most likely be the only bright spots, especially anti-anxiety drugs... :-)

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.

bkeroack• 10 years ago

Linkedin is down 38%. Tesla is down quite a bit. My guess is that some VCs were leveraged and had to liquidate positions.

You're not a VC if your money is in publicly-traded firms.

pbreit• 10 years ago

VCs do not liquidate immediately at the IPO or even upon lock-up expiration. But I would agree that this downward pressure is not VC-driven.

Kluny• 10 years ago

Or maybe, this is a crazy idea, some VCs have diversified portfolios that include public stocks.

headgasket2• 10 years ago

Did you think that as soon as a company goes public, VCs get to sell all their stocks?

jscheel• 10 years ago

A lot of biotech has been taking a beating so far this year. It's been brutal for the short-term.

tomp2• 10 years ago

You're saying that VCs (i.e. funds that do not invest in public companies) figured out they're too leveraged and had to sell the (public!) share of LinkedIn exactly as LinkedIn announced horrible results/outlook?

A few things in the above explanaiton aren't completely consistent...

johnrob• 10 years ago

VCs end up holding public shares when their portfolio companies IPO.

tjpd2• 10 years ago

This is probably wrong. IMHO what looks like has happened is there are a handful of HN-relevant companies had weak earning announcements yesterday[1] after market close, and that is coupled with a weaker US jobs report [2], [3] today. The overall market is off and there are a handful of major drops for the companies mentioned but this is not some public tech market panic event (yet).

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...

Riod• 10 years ago

Jobs report was good so usd shot up because the case for looser monetary policy harder to make.

smileysteve• 10 years ago

that is coupled with a weaker US jobs report

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.

vvanders2• 10 years ago

TSLA is getting hammered(incorrectly) by gas prices being at all-time lows. Sounds like a great time to buy some more stock to me :).

refurb5• 10 years ago

TSLA is getting hammered because analysts don't believe they'll sell as many cars as they say. Some of it due to lower gas prices.

wdewind2• 10 years ago

My guess is that some VCs were leveraged and had to liquidate positions.

VCs cannot just sell public stock on a whim, these things are scheduled far in advance and can only happen during trading windows.

ap222133• 10 years ago

Could it also be affected by the Amazon QuickSight preview that is going live?

cissou• 10 years ago

likely, considering Qlikview is down 14%

tomasien2• 10 years ago

I don't know what Tableau Software is and I found it pretty amazing that when I Google it I could still not figure it out because all the results were about the stock price. I think people might be focusing too much on stock price is Googling a company's name doesn't result in seeing the company's website on the first page of results.....

gabriel34• 10 years ago

Tableau makes software for the presentation layer of business intelligence systems (basically graphs and dashboards)

I have limited experience with it (only POCs), but I liked it very much.

They usually figure well in Gartner rankings

sologoub2• 10 years ago

Tableau is a visualization software that you can bolt on top of many different data sources, from spreadsheets to BI tools and even AWS RedShift to get awesome looking dashboards and interactive visuals.

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.

floppydisk• 10 years ago

They still are popular, especially in the government contracting world. It's almost a mandatory requirement their business analysts use Tableau when creating dashboards for clients.

cscharenberg• 10 years ago

The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect.

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.

vailripper• 10 years ago

We're using them for a client, and pretty much every client I've worked with lately is using them. I think they'll be just fine, it's still a good product.

gomox4• 10 years ago

Tableau is a surprisingly good desktop application for business intelligence and analytics that, IMO, grew too big for its own good. You plug it into data (spreadsheets, databases, you name it) and it makes it very simple (drag-and-drop simple) to crunch some numbers and produce interesting graphs, visualizations and analysis.

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.

PaulHoule• 10 years ago

It's a pretty good product but everybody and his brother sells analytics and visualization tools, most of the companies that have been around a while sell a few different tools since they've grown by acquisition.

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.

nevi-me6• 10 years ago

Nail on the head regarding either selling a lot cheap, or little at high price. They went for the latter as you mention. I manage software licenses at my employer, and have been put off the price of Tableau, and the inflexibility they have. We're a consulting house, and mostly use Qlik. We started using Tableau last year.

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.

7952• 10 years ago

desktop application for business intelligence and analytics

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.

TWAndrews• 10 years ago

or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter

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.

2434646465• 10 years ago

I used to work at a company where, under duress, I had to push tableau to its limits. My company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. The main use was to provide reports on the data created by the application we sold.

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.

rockdiesel2• 10 years ago

I find that hard to believe unless you were searching just on Google News.

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.

http://i.imgur.com/tV89FoZ.png

tomasien2• 10 years ago

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

wbeckler• 10 years ago

This will happen for google searches where there's a hot news story that is more likely to be what people are looking for. For spiking searches, Google automatically applies a principle called "Query Deserves Freshness" and they rank pages that are more fresh. So the brand site and wikipedia and other more authoritative explanations of the brand will be temporarily deranked.

chollida12• 10 years ago

Though the outcome is a bit worse than I think most predicted, this has been telegraphed since about November of last year. Tableau has had a very high short interest ratio for sometime, everyone was expecting poor results.

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.

roymurdock• 10 years ago

Do you have any insights into how badly core infrastructure institutional investors are going to get hit when these large, institutional-owned tech companies deflate? Any metrics on how much of the equities market is owned by pension/retirement vs. free, non-dependent, non-core institutional investments?

chollida12• 10 years ago

Hmm, I do, but I probably shouldn't be talking publicly about it as I got most of them from sell side analysts.

Privately disclosing them is different, Message me if you want numbers.

jonknee5• 10 years ago

It would make a nice acquisition for Microsoft...

TheLogothete9• 10 years ago

Not after all the investment in powerbi, sadly.

IndianAstronaut5• 10 years ago

Tableau wrotes the worst queries for Microsoft SQL Server products.

kgwgk• 10 years ago

everyone was expecting poor results.

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.

this_user• 10 years ago

LinkedIn got crushed today in a very similar fashion on weak earnings. So, it's not just Tableau. In fact, the whole tech sector is starting to show some weakness which can be seen from the NASDAQ's recent performance. A lot of last year's tech-related IPOs have also performed terribly (e.g. Etsy, Box, Match, First Data, Square). Especially recently a lot of the previous momentum darlings like Apple, Amazon and Netflix have started rolling over, too. Facebook and Google were holding much better after strong earnings, but even those are starting to show signs of weakness now. Seems like we might be at the end of the phase of explosive growth over the last couple of years.

edwinnathaniel• 10 years ago

New Relic also down by 25%, crazy day for Silicon Valley.

nemo44x2• 10 years ago

Which is pointless since they had a great earnings report, were cash flow positive for the quarter and raised their guidance. Additionally they mentioned in the call that no sector is more than 20% of their customers so they are diversified if a certain sector really tanks - like tech. They have 180 million in the bank so won't need credit markets any time soon and gradually approaching profitability.

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.

simo76• 10 years ago

Just looked at it. No profit and trading at 10x revenues.

You might be right who knows, but can't realy say the fear on this stock is irrational at the moment, imho

frik4• 10 years ago

New Relic CEO (Lewis Cirne) sold all his shares the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11045065

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.

nrjames• 10 years ago

Interesting that Microstrategy also is down quite a bit.

kevinwong• 10 years ago

Before this drop they were trading at 14x forward revenue; now they're at 7x. Splunk was at 12x, now at 9.7x. We'll have to revisit what the typical multiple range is for BI/enterprise saas companies.

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.

physcab7• 10 years ago

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making.

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).

chebum2• 10 years ago

Have you used any tools built on top of DevExpress BI? How did they feel?

physcab7• 10 years ago

Never heard of DevExpress but just by going to the website it feels far less intuitive than Tableau. Tableau is so freaking easy that you don't need to be experienced in BI to be user.

spike021• 10 years ago

For that use-case is Tableau a more useful tool than something like Splunk or ELK stack?

dev1n• 10 years ago

Tableau is for business analysts. ELK is for Sys Admins. I think.

tetha• 10 years ago

From experience, there's a nontrivial intersection between the BI stack and the operative administration stack.

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.

topogios2• 10 years ago

Asking out of curiosity:

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?

melted2• 10 years ago

It depends on whether you want your BI to be generated by a battle tested product, or by a melange of a rickety, buggy, half baked stuff that hardly anyone is able to use without paying $10K+/yr for a support contract.

physcab7• 10 years ago

Less moving parts. If I get a request from a PM, I quickly open up Tableau, select a datasource or write some SQL and deploy. Sometimes data asks that they think would take 24 hours or more can be turned around in under an hour with Tableau. You can also train and hire less technical people to use Tableau...its basically like advanced Microsoft Word.

IndianAstronaut5• 10 years ago

I don't think enough people have tried Shiny. It is fantastic and super easy. People really assume it is very difficult to get a grasp of.

babo2• 10 years ago

Tableau is a great product but with a high price stigma. I really like it, when clients asking for recommendation my first answer is Tableau. They like the product and the features but the reaction is always the same: nice, but it's too expensive for us, we'll go with PowerBI. Competing with Microsoft is a tough game.

physcab7• 10 years ago

The price is expensive but if I'm charging $100 - $150 / hr and it takes me twice as long to do something in PowerBI that it does in Tableau, Tableau quickly pays for itself for the desktop software. Then you can multiply that across a team of experienced BI professionals and even the product team because they can easily view workbooks and give feedback. That would easily outweigh the costs of Tableau Server.

shad0wc0dex• 10 years ago

I am stuck with SAP Business Objects (Crystal Reports) at my company. It is ok, but the features of Tableau look like they blow it out of the water. I've tried to get discovery projects started up to look at other options for due diligence. However no one seems to go for it. Oh well :/

AJ007• 10 years ago

It is expensive if you have a lot of people. Paying $2k for a license may be for two or three analysts is a good deal. Compare this to a start up like Looker which costs substantially more to get your foot in the door (last I checked, correct me if I'm wrong.)

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.

chris_wot17• 10 years ago

It's not PowerBI they are competing with. It's Qlikview. Their biggest issue is that Qlikview is viral: you can use the evaluation version ("personal edition") for as long as you want, but it has restrictions. With Tableau, you get a 15 day trial. Consequently, it gets used in businesses for small data projects, gets seen to be really effective, then the business realises it's effective and buys licenses.

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.

frik4• 10 years ago

MS SQL server is very expensive, especially thanks since their recent license changes. Microsoft BI (PowerBI, etc) is to lock you in to their ecosystem (MSSQL, Excel, SharePoint/Office365, Windows Servers/Azure cloud).

clintboxe• 10 years ago

Finally someone else who has felt that pain of GoodData.. I was hired to make it work after GD's consultants set it up at my current company. What a nightmare. It took a year+ but I finally convinced everyone that it was terrible and we switched to Tableau, which let us use our own db's instead of GD's terrible "logical data model"

vadym909• 10 years ago

'what it means in terms of stock' Exactly- The problems (big price drop) arise only when the stock price is at unreasonably high levels based on unreasonable growth assumptions by Wall Street. So the same people that cause it go 'bubble' then cause it to go 'burst' wreaking all kinds of collateral damage (employee stock options, morale, etc).

hueving• 10 years ago

Wall Street isn't responsible for the bubble. It's the company leadership misrepresenting the company's road map. A stock won't become overpriced if the CEO blatantly says that sales will probably only go up 5% this year.

njx3• 10 years ago

you should check out the web based alternative http://www.infocaptor.com 70% functionality of Tableau

mrgordon4• 10 years ago

Just to offer a different opinion: I know a lot of people who have been switching away from Tableau or not choosing it and using a different solution (or multiple) instead

rburhum• 10 years ago

I evaluated 15 different similar solutions and trying to settle on one. Curious as to what your friends are switching to.

IndianAstronaut5• 10 years ago

Tableau is not scriptable. 3 places I have worked are moving away from it because of this severe limitation. You have no control over what queries it writes and you can't easily add simple scripts to make things more seamless or performant, like say a quick scripted query to populate a dropdown menu.

chris_wot17• 10 years ago

I've played with Tableau, is there no scripting at all? Their previous Director of Analytic Product Management Stephen McDaniel stated that in v8 they were going to add server side Javascript - and he said this in 2012...

https://community.tableau.com/ideas/1694#comment-2661

physcab7• 10 years ago

It's not very scriptable but that's not the use case of Tableau. Generally data analysts do not know how to program. They meet with PMs to understand concerns, interpret concerns into metrics, write some SQL, and display them in dashboards.

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.

huherto• 10 years ago

What are they moving to ?

astine• 10 years ago

"You have no control over what queries it writes"

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.

ziszis• 10 years ago

We used Tableau for about a year and then decided to drop them. The reason was a sudden change in licensing terms where: 1. The minimum step increase in server cores changed. 2. The cost to run ha increased. 3. The cost per core increased.

The only thing that is worse than an expensive product, is one that has unpredictable pricing.

aagha• 10 years ago

Furthermore, their support is amazing. I've emailed their support in the last couple of weeks and they've called within an hour to help resolve the issue.

yawgmoth• 10 years ago

Their desktop publisher or Tableau Server? Because Tableau Server is the biggest POS I have ever used. Their API is fundamentally broken, their authorization model misses large gaps, and client-integration is seemingly something they never considered.

brooklyndude• 10 years ago

I can hack d3js. Can crunch billions of records in a flash of the eye, can wrangle most any DB (NoSQL, et al) out there, why would I need Tableau?

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. :-)

justinlilly• 10 years ago

Tableau is for business users to generate graphs. Also d3js is a bear to work with until you've steeped your brain in it.

By your logic, there's no need to use MS Word, people should just use TeX.

notyourwork2• 10 years ago

Well said, the word/tex analogy is spot on.

npalli• 10 years ago

No you don't get it. Tableau is for people who can't hack (or don't want to hack) d3js or crunch billions of records or whatever techie thing you seem to be so proud of. The mission is supposed to be self-service business intelligence, i.e, allowing a typical business analyst to drag drop and create good visualizations and analytics. Not dick around and waste time with databases and javascript.

2434646465• 10 years ago

Except that it only lets you do a set number of things. Most requests for information are not simple, and once you leave the comfort of simplicity, you have to become an expert in tableau, or in many cases, just accept that it can't do what you want it to do.

Unless your queries are very simple, you are better off finding a programmer and asking them to do your job.

cheeze• 10 years ago

Seriously? It's almost as if companies don't want to hire a badass hacker to generate a business report used by non-tech workers. Tableau has a huge place in the BI community, and the last thing that a manager wants is somebody hacking d3js to to create some visualizations.

chris_wot17• 10 years ago

$1,000 to generate a business report? That's how much a single Tableau license is going to cost you. You still need to train up the staff member to know how to use it (yes, it's probably the most intuitive BI tool on the market, but like anything it has a learning curve).

That's a lot of money for a business report.

gmac• 10 years ago

I can do all that too, but I'm fairly sure experienced Tableau people can do it significantly faster than I can for a comparable quality of result. (Tableau is the only non-open-source software in the stack my company runs).

wyck4• 10 years ago

Lol, so I use Tableau every week. For example today I had a government request to measure quantity of customers outside a particular business radius of 40km. Meaning what percent of total visits are in the radius vs outside it. I had 8k postal codes.

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.

2434646465• 10 years ago

A programmers whose job is to make these kinds of reports will already have information about postcodes and so on, and take less time than you. Tableau is quick at doing simple things, but takes a lot of learning to do complex things. Often, you will have to resort to custom scripts, creating views, etc. Often, it just won't have the ability to do certain things.

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.

RockyMcNuts• 10 years ago

or plotly ... or shiny ...

https://plot.ly/javascript/ http://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/

njx3• 10 years ago

Actually the analytics is the missing part in d3 and charting libraries. http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/charting-engines-vs-anal...

walker77345• 10 years ago

Yup! Tableau isn't just about the end visualization. It is about the exploration of your data and the analytics that go behind the final visual. That is where the power of Tableau lies.

2434646465• 10 years ago

You are 100% correct. I worked in a company that used Tableau heavily and I am pretty sure I know more about Tableau than most people here.

irunred• 10 years ago

Looker is a much better product.

dberg• 10 years ago

Agree, Looker customer here. Awesome product for ad-hoc BI reporting. Sits on top of Amazon Redshift perfectly and is quite fast for ad-hoc reporting.

narrator• 10 years ago

Tableau is a great product, but it's very expensive, like Oracle expensive. I used Saiku to hack together some BI dashboards for free http://www.meteorite.bi/. It did the job with a little bit of work.

clebio• 10 years ago

Just curious whether anyone (else) here has experience with Bime? https://www.bimeanalytics.com/

vhold• 10 years ago

I wonder how that will affect this:

"Tableau confirms big Kirkland expansion, plans to hire 1,000"

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/tableau-conf...

therealdrag0• 10 years ago

Wondering the same thing.

tdicola• 10 years ago

Ouch, good question. Although the building they want to lease in is part of a major development happening in Kirkland over the next few years. It will be full of other businesses and retail, so not just Tableau. It's also right across the street from their current Kirkland office I believe.

nfd• 10 years ago

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that they're going to keep going on that guy, possibly with a bit of delay. Running joke over here is that Fremont is basically TableauVille. Or they're to Fremont as Microsoft is to Redmond. Hell, rumor has it that new buildings are being built in Fremont just for their damn expansion right now (take a wild guess if you're in the neighborhood which ones--it's not hard, just look for glass). I doubt even a big dip in share price is gonna quash their thirst for real estate for very long.

kumarski• 10 years ago

The analytics space is over-crowded.

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.

twright• 10 years ago

To be fair the markets are really getting beat down today. e.g. LinkedIn is down 45% from $194.

wyck4• 10 years ago

Honestly I don't care about stock rhetoric, it's an awesome product I use every week. I evaluated lot's of BI's options because it's a pricey product and I'm super happy with it, Tableau is actually fun (because its so easy yet powerful) and meaningful. The only other decent alternative was Qlik but it was more pricey for the options I needed.

bayonetz• 10 years ago

Tableau is definitely a useful tool. Tried getting folks with Tableau skills in previous whoishiring post. The other positions I posted got a lot of response but not the Tableau-oriented ones. Looks like plenty of enthusiasts in this thread through. Where were you all? Hey, in the off chance you are Iinterested in working in Tableau at a think tank (RAND) send me (Chris) a note at dev.hiring@rand.org.

chris_wot17• 10 years ago

There's a reason for this. Unless you work in an organization that has already implemented Tableau, or is willing to take a punt on using it, then there is just no easy way to get skilled up on it.

infinite8s14• 10 years ago

Tableau Public isn't sufficient?

gvenier• 10 years ago

I'm sure Tableau has its own right place in the plateau of BI & Analytics for big companies. As for small businesses and custom-built analytics as well as for operational data UIs you'll probably have no alternative than hacking it yourself with d3js. Or using it Tadaboard-like alternatives.

jayonsoftware• 10 years ago

I was one of the first people to start using Tableau, I even bought a license for my own use so I can learn (Yep sick of the 14 day trial), but these days Excel / Power BI does most the work, Salesforce with Wave is competing with them plus so many open source software.

rossjudson• 10 years ago

About 5 minutes of searching shows me that Tableau has had a massive growth of revenue, but a slightly more massive growth in sales/administrative expenses. What that tells me is this: The market loves Tableau, and keeps buying more of it. But the company has serious cost control problems in its sales and marketing departments, and has expanded there far too fast.

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.

joeevans1000• 10 years ago

The problem is that you make something cool in Tableau and then want to collaborate with someone... and even if you talk them into it, soon their trial runs out. Yes, it's powerful and featured, but today's scene is about collaboration and sharing... and the sticker shock is just too much for that.

samstave3• 10 years ago

Apologies if the following is ignorant:

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)

foxylad2• 10 years ago

Downvoted. Your point may not be ignorant, but it certainly seems that way given the unnecessarily violent language.

solipsism• 10 years ago

His/her words are too naughty to be tolerated? They offend you to such a degree that you can't just ignore them? Come on now.

ajmurmann2• 10 years ago

If you have problems with "violent language" then that shouldn't lead to valuable content being hidden from others who don't have mental issues triggered by words they fifth like.

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

Vulgarity equates to violence? What a brave new world!

dang3• 10 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11046494 and marked it off-topic.

MikeOfAu• 10 years ago

I was an early adopter of Tableau and fairly enthusiastic. But then I had a truly terrible licencing experience with them and have, since, refused to have ANYTHING to do with them.

Nice enough software, but a sleazy organisation. Use one of the other good alternatives.

NotSammyHagar• 10 years ago

What happened with the licensing? I see a few other people complaining about this.

WWKong• 10 years ago

I was previously a Tableau expert at my then job. I was amazed at the missed opportunities by Tableau to make it indispensable to organizations. The core product was fine but it seemed like they could use a good PM to implement features around sharing, permissions, pricing etc. $1000 license for clients to view some basic report in a browser, the other option being a desktop installed reader.

matdrewin• 10 years ago

There are several factors at play. I believe one of them is MS Power BI catching up.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-m...

simo76• 10 years ago

Reporting --> Chartio, Sisense, Looker etc. (anything web focused without a desktop version pretty much)

Analysis --> Ipython

No room for Tableau and similar.

infinite8s14• 10 years ago

Tableau makes most straightforward analyses much simpler than attempting to do it in Ipython/pandas, especially when connecting to standard corporate data warehouses (probably on the order of 10x faster). Of course you quickly hit a ceiling in terms of complexity, but most analysts never really get to that point.

simo76• 10 years ago

Simple analysis usually answer recurrent questions, for this there is reporting and Tableau is not a good tool for reporting (too slow).

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.

swingbridge• 10 years ago

Tableau is a decent product, but a decent product doesn't make a great company. Main issues are:

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.

infinite8s14• 10 years ago

Those are excellent points. As an exploratory tool Tableau is well worth the money, but if you are just using it to replace some basic C-level reporting than its really expensive for that.

noisy_boy2• 10 years ago

I use Tableau almost daily. Initially I found it harder to work with and avoided it for a while. On 2nd attempt, for some reason, everything clicked into place and I now find it fairly intuitive. Some of my opinions/experiences about it:

- 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.

simo76• 10 years ago

What do you use it for?

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.

noisy_boy2• 10 years ago

I wasn't part of the decision making effort but I believe Qikview was also considered but the analysts preferred Tableau. It is used by the analysts as well our for our internal monitoring/charting/analysis purposes.

Tableau stock down almost 50%

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