were expanding out into
brand-new
products like data prep, and now data cataloging coming around the corner, and all sorts of other exciting things.
And a deep platform with, you know, over 75 different data sources that we connect to. You guys know all this, its an incredible platform. Weve also built incredible capabilities around, you know, marketing and talking to our customers,
and field presence, selling to them, and servicing them. Its just an incredible set of capabilities that have been built.
And its used by a
lot of people, right? You know, over 86,000 customer accounts, millions of human beings, people that have used Tableau, and thats just an incredible thing that the people at this company have built. And again, in not that long occurring of a
time actually.
(
4:23
) So, when we were approached about this, I mean we were obviously heads down and going about our business. But, through those
discussions we quickly saw that were a special company, and Salesforce is a special company too. Theyve built something incredible, starting in the CRM space. First with sales, then, kind of like weve been
expandingtheyre a few years ahead of us, but expanding into marketing, and service, and now application integration and a bunch of different areas. You know, very very successful companya lot of customers. Similar growth and
expanding out and really building a platform over time.
And it very quickly became apparent just how exciting some of the similaritiessome of the
synergies, I should saybetween the companies. Again its still early and we dont have plans, its more like hopes and dreams, but if you start thinking about the product side, its got everything from all of those
Salesforce customers using
think about how we use Salesforce, and how many thousands of people here use Salesforce
the opportunities for integration there and to put Tableau in front of those people in their work fabric, in those
experiences. You look at Mulesoft and this whole application integration space, the ability to integrate. And of course we do all sorts of things which are just many many and myriad of other ways in which people are being analysts, or doing
analysis, many of which have nothing to do with customer-facing things. Thats a chance for us to add extra value to all of those customers, and to bring Salesforce capabilities to them.
I think from a marketing and sales perspective, this is just an incredible potential accelerant for us. So if you just look at the many thousands of field
people that Salesforce has, you look at Dreamforce which has 175,000 people that descend on San Francisco. We get to market there for free now. So, things like that can be incredibly powerful if you say well what can we do, what are some of
the most dramatic things we could be conceivably doing to take amazing capabilities that we have built, and continue to build, and whats the biggest thing that we can do to tell the world about them, and to get those out into the world?
I cant think of much bigger than this.
So really, fundamentally, to me this is a way to potentially dramatically accelerate our ability to
accomplish our mission, to make further progress on it, and to kind of get that vision of really, you know, everyone in the world being able to see and understand data. You know, we talk about entering the era of analytics ubiquitythis is
going to help make analytics much more ubiquitous. In fact, weve been jokingly calling it accelerated ubiquityIll give the marketing team credit for that.
So I think theres lots of possibilities. I realize everything I just said is a little bit high level, thats intentional. Were still two
separate operating companies, and we havent gotten down to the nitty gritty of that, but I think the opportunities are incredible.
(8:00)
Really, really importantlyall that stuffs well and good, but a huge and important thing and a driving factor behind our thinking this was a good idea at all, and something that our founders, our board, our senior management team, you
know all have spent a lot of time on is the culture, the values, the people. And those are things which are incredibly important to Tableau and again are intrinsic to why so many of us are here, and have chosen to be here. And its quite
amazing to me how much overlap, how much similarity there is in those elements, how culturally similar we are. How much sharing there is of the same types of values. Maybe different words here or there, but the same types of values. You know
starting with just an [inaudible] focus on the customer, they talk about customer success, we talk about a relentless customer focus in driving our businesses through that lens.