Analytics & BI Acquisitions Firestorm
Just as I started to write a blog post on the Google–Looker deal, news broke that Salesforce is acquiring Tableau. And for Pete’s sake, did Salesforce really need to release this news just as Microsoft was kicking off its Business Apps conference? Ah, but of course.
I’ve only been at ThoughtSpot for 9-weeks. And in that short time, there have been no less than five acquisitions in the analytics industry. Five! Given many of you have been pinging me offline about these moves, I wanted to break them down for you.
Salesforce-Tableau: At $15.7 billion, this is the largest analytics industry deal in the last few weeks. It’s also combining both a revenue market share leader in Tableau and a Gartner MQ leader, with a Visionary in Salesforce.
Salesforce Einstein has had good market momentum, but it has not broadened its adoption much beyond the Salesforce originated data into broader analytics use cases. One of the secret gems was its acquisition of BeyondCore that brought augmented analytics into the portfolio: Salesforce Einstein Discovery. In this regard, the Tableau acquisition is good for Salesforce from a product perspective, while also a good move for Tableau shareholders. Tableau and Microsoft have been in a fierce fight the last three years, with Tableau’s stock under pressure.
But there is significant overlap in the product portfolios. Tableau’s acquisition of Emperical Systems for augmented analytics no doubt will now be sidelined (the product was demo’d at the Gartner BI Bakeoff, but is not GA). The immediate goal for Salesforce and Tableau will be to rationalize duplicate products and improve the integration. One has to wonder if Tableau will become the face of the Salesforce analytics apps, which are full cloud products, given Tableau has continued to lag in its browser-based authoring. All this means that it is not necessarily good news for Tableau customers. The reactions on Twitter were decidedly mixed.
Google-Looker: That Google acquired Looker for $2.6 billion shows the health of the analytics and BI market place, as some sources had Looker valued at 1.5B. It also shows a more aggressive approach under Thomas Kurian’s leadership since he joined from Oracle.
