The rapid growth of web, mobile and social technology has vastly expanded the flow of data. Many SMEs, just like their larger counterparts, realise this data can help them better understand their customers, develop new markets and a more efficient cost base. However, while collecting data is one thing, understanding it and using it effectively is a different matter. The challenge is that few SMEs have the same capacity as larger organisations to analyse the data they produce and store on Excel spreadsheets.

This is where Tableau comes in. The American company, which established its European base in Dublin in 2013, is focused on making visual analytics easy to use for everyone. A download of the free trial software and you will be introduced to an interactive data visualisation tool that makes quick work of data analysis through the use of an interactive dashboard to search, query, analyse and visualise chunks of data in order to generate useful business insights.

Data Insight

“Our focus is on creating a self-service data analytics platform that is fast and easy-to-use,” says Eugene Hillery, Director of International Operations at Tableau in Dublin.

“What Tableau offers is speed to insight and depth of insight. It can be used by companies of all shapes and sizes, whether they are the largest in the world or the smallest. We have 32,000 customers globally and are counting to grow rapidly. The vast majority of our customers are small businesses.”

In Association with

While corporates have bespoke databases full of information to be scrutinised, how do SMEs generally use Tableau to interpret their data? “The obvious one is if an SME is using Excel to store data. Tableau can connect to Excel and make sense of it very rapidly. You can quickly see trends and produce visually impressive representations. And it is incredibly easy to use.”

Tableau’s primary market is the enterprise. The product is designed and built to leverage off SAP and SQL databases and crunch them into graphs and pie charts. But the company is also very focused on spreadsheet users. In its market analysis, Tableau describes the enterprise Business Intelligence market as ‘the few’. The next market – information workers who rely on Excel – is three to four times as large as is described by Tableau as ‘the many’. The largest potential market, in Tableau’s view, is ‘the most’ i.e. information workers who don’t use BI tools or Excel.

Tableau Public

Tableau is adopting various stratagems to convert everyone in business who engages with figures or data to adopt their visual approach. They have a website platform Tableau Public where individuals can upload any data they want and have it transformed into an information graphic. Tableau Public has over 60,000 users and publishes thousands of shared data workbooks every week.

The company is currently working on ‘Project Elastic’, a tablet app that converts XLS data into graphs that can be modified and analysed with screen swipes. The thinking seems to be that if people can get used to converting spreadsheets to visual information on their handheld device, then they’ll pony up €450 per user per year for the software to use in their micro and small business.

Tableau users in Ireland include corporates such as Bank of Ireland, Vodafone, Irish Life and Aer Lingus, but there are SME fans too. Real World Retail, which provides decision support to retailers, needed a way to analyse and make sense of the large amount of data its clients produced and present that data in an-easy-to-understand and visually appealing manner.

“Mostly we're looking at point-of-sale data,” says founder John Hogan. “We have a large amount of data at our fingertips and one of the key things Tableau does is convert that data into very simple visualisations and insights. You can start with what you think you might see, and then basically when you do your data discovery, invariably, you'll find something else is going on. And so you get to see what is happening in the retailer's business very easily in a way that wasn't apparent before.”

International Growth

Tableau was founded in Seattle in 2002 but it is in the last five years that the company began making a big impact in the world of business intelligence. Since 2010, its customer base has jumped from 4,400 to a projected 35,000 by the end of 2015. Revenues have ballooned from €30m in 2010 to €370m in 2014, and in the six months to end June 2015 turnover advanced 70% year-on-year.

Tableau’s net loss for the period was €26m as the company splurged on sales and marketing. In Dublin, Tableau recently relocated to a larger office at The Oval building on Shelbourne Road. “Our international growth in Q2 was 83% year-on-year,” says Hillery. “We have 40 people in Ireland across sales, customer support, technical support, finance, recruitment and product troubleshooting. We will be increasing our workforce in Dublin to 120.”

With over 90% of the world’s data created only over the last few years, according to IBM, Tableau is a relatively affordable solution when it comes to helping small businesses get on top of trading trends through data analysis.

“We want to land in an organisation through someone choosing to use Tableau,” says Hillery. “Once that happens, we find that other people start asking about it and they will soon want to also start using it. This is how we land and expand, and it is a strategy that has proven highly successful and will continue to do so into the future.”

Not So Easy

Data visualisation is fine in theory but don’t think you can just download a free Tableau trial and suddenly you’re a graphics genius. Creating a visualisation that is effective and informative is a fine art that requires training and weeks and months of practice.

Tableau advises that the single most important step you can take to make a great visualisation is to know what you’re trying to say. Who is your audience? What questions do they have? What answers do you find for them? Once you have a purpose for your visualisation in mind, you need to consider chart types.

For Trends over Time, you need to consider line charts, area charts or bar charts. Another method for analysing data is comparison and ranking, usually using a bar chart. Correlation is used for identifying relationships between measures, while distribution analysis shows how your quantitative values are distributed across their full quantitative range. In this area you need to explore box plots and histograms. Part to Whole is another type of data analysis. Pie charts are not recommended, though they are for geographical data.

After you’ve chosen your chart types, the next issue to consider is the views. “Creating effective views requires effort, intuition, attention to detail, and trial and error,” advises Tableau. So you really have to know whether the most important data goes on the X- or Y- axis. And if you’re doing comparisons, you need to know about the bullet chart. After all that you can move on to dashboards and filters.

Takeover Candidate

The growth story is evident enough and investors like it. Though the Tableau share, quoted on NYSE, was back recently to $85 from a July high of $126, the market still values Tableau at $6 billion. The company is seen as a potential takeover target for Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or even Google, and whatever happens Tableau is likely to emerge into the business mainstream in future years.

According to company co-founder and CEO Christian Chabot, this means that business executives need to get up to speed with his invention. Chabot told the Irish Times earlier this year: “From an R&D perspective we are finding that the use of data is becoming a job skill more and more. Five years from today, if people show up to a job and don’t know how to use and analyse data, it would be like showing up to a job today and not knowing how to use Microsoft Word.”