Salesforce aims to bring “data literacy” to everyone in business with $15.7 billion takeover of Tableau

Salesforce is acquiring Tableau in a $15.7 billion deal, its biggest acquisition to date, to create what CEO Marc Benioff calls the largest community of data experts in the world.

Tableau‘s data analytics and visualization platform has 86,000 customers, including Charles Schwab, Verizon, Schneider Electric, Southwest Airlines and Netflix. Benioff observed:

The deal is pitched as bringing together the “number one CRM with the number one analytics firm”. Benioff expanded:

There are three cornerstones of digital transformation. From Salesforce’s point of view, there is the customer. You’ve got to hook all that data together, which is why we acquired Mulesoft. But at the end of the day, customers want to see and understand their data. Putting these three together – customer, integration, data – that’s where the magic starts of happen. Tableau is all about people seeing and understanding data; Salesforce is all about helping people engage with and understand customers. Together, we have the leading products in the most important categories underpinning digital transformation.

Tableau will remain headquartered in Seattle and will continue to be led by CEO Adam Selipsky. Seattle will become Salesforce’s second HQ, said Benioff, adding that he admires the talent market in the city, where Salesforce already has over 1000 people in place:

Previously, Salesforce’s largest purchase was the $6.5 billion deal to snap up Mulesoft last year.  Rumors of a Salesforce takeover of Tableau have been rife for some time. Benioff said:

We’ve tried to do something for a long time, but it’s hard to get the stars to align. We were fortunate that we got there. Our customers are looking to do a lot more in this area. When I talk to some of our largest customers, we’re talking about Salesforce and all of the products that they’re using…and then they’re talking about how they’re using Tableau.

That, he said, prompted him to wonder what could be done with an integrated Salesforce and Tableau combo as a strategic sell:

With Salesforce already having skin in the analytics game with its own Wave offering, the Tableau deal is positioned as bringing ‘data literacy’ to everyone in a business and expand beyond Salesforce’s own clouds. Benioff said:

We got our feet wet, especially in Sales Analytics, not just offering dashboards in CRM as we’ve done for 20 years.