Last week, Salesforce announced a $15.7-billion deal to acquire Tableau, teasing, in a news release, the capacity for Tableau’s analytics to enable more data-driven business decisions in the global “digital transformation” market, which International Data Corporation expects to reach $1.8 trillion by 2022. Both Salesforce and Tableau declined to be interviewed about the acquisition, which they expect to close before the end of the third fiscal quarter on Oct. 31, 2019.
According to the news release, Salesforce’s CRM has more than 1.4 million "Trailblazers," an ambiguous term that doesn't necessarily equate to customers, and Tableau more than 1 million across 86,000 organizations.
“Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, in a statement. “It's … bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world.”
The implications of the deal for state and local government are hard to guess, but the news release said that Tableau, by integrating with Salesforce’s Customer 360 and Einstein features, should make its analytics more incisive and accurate and help the company reach new users.
Neither companies exist exclusively to serve government, but both have released updates in recent years aimed at that market, or at tech companies already in it. In 2015, Salesforce added its Wave Analytics platform to its government cloud offerings and launched its own IoT Cloud, aimed at helping customers provide more responsive services in exchange for personal data. Tableau has been refining its visualization platform for years, adding PDF functions, alerts and other features that governments could find helpful.
After the acquisition is complete, Tableau will continue operating independently under its own brand, headquartered in Seattle and led by CEO Adam Selipsky and his current leadership team.
"Joining forces with Salesforce will enhance our ability to help people everywhere see and understand data," Selipsky said in a statement. "As part of the world's No. 1 CRM company, Tableau's intuitive and powerful analytics will enable millions more people to discover actionable insights across their entire organizations.”
