Tableau Cloud offers the best of Tableau, fully hosted in the cloud – “the fastest and easiest way for customers to get the full value of Tableau at enterprise scale”. It’s a reintroduction of Tableau Online that includes several new innovations for delivering intelligent and easy-to-use analytical tools to help anyone uncover insights. There’s a data revolution – Tableau leaders have asked: How do we make data more approachable?
Salesforce will showcase the new Tableau Cloud at the annual Tableau Conference, taking place May 17-19, 2022. The unofficial theme we’ve heard, in passing, is “unleash your inner data scientist”. A boon for both data analysts and business users alike, this comes ‘hot on the heels’ of the revamped Tableau developer experience, which was unveiled at Trailblazer DX ‘22 less than one month ago.
Why Tableau Cloud?
According to Tableau, three-quarters of new customers choose Tableau Cloud over an on-premise or hybrid solution to power their analytics.
The need for speed is a driving factor – users need to access data faster, to experience a faster time to value.
“Speed, ease of use, and flexibility have been the key differentiators for Tableau. Tableau Cloud helps our customers deliver the analytics they need to their users, while we ensure the highest levels of trust, availability, and performance.” – Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Tableau at Salesforce.
The reintroduction of Tableau Online, as Tableau Cloud, covers the following announcements:
- Data Stories for Tableau
- Tableau Accelerators
- Tableau Advanced Management
- Einstein + Tableau (Business Science)
Data Stories for Tableau
Tableau has observed a data literacy challenge – people don’t necessarily speak the language of data – it’s just too hard to understand. The question is, how do we flip this challenge on its head and make data more approachable?
The team at Tableau asked themselves: How do we make data speak the language of people? In response, they decided to enable people to very easily find a story in their data. They have made data feel more natural by adding plain-language explanations, and writing stories for Tableau dashboards – automatically. This will increase the adoption of data because everyone will now be able to understand and interact with it.
The story format eliminates the need to explain dashboards repeatedly, making data far more accessible to business users. In fact, data analysts have been doing this for a long time – they report, then pull out insights for a business user audience. However, Tableau believes that software should take care of this.
Tableau Accelerators
These are ready-to-use, customizable dashboards that can be utilized across multiple industries/departments/enterprise applications to quickly “plug in” data and have insights delivered rapidly.
The 100+ accelerators are available via the Tableau Exchange, the trusted hub of offerings for extending the Tableau Platform. These also include accelerators built by experts across the
Tableau Partner Network.
Tableau Advanced Management
Manage, secure, and scale mission-critical analytics across the enterprise.
Administrators can gain deep insight into adoption and performance, leverage advanced encryption capabilities to meet security requirements, and gain increased capacity limits to ensure teams and individuals have access to relevant data – for example:
- Customer-Managed Encryption Keys: Meet organizational compliance standards and add an additional layer of protection.
- Activity Log: Detailed event data to help administrators keep track of how individuals are using Tableau. It also enables permission auditing to better implement controls over an enterprise’s deployment. Data is retained for up to one year to track dataset usage, license adoption, and visualization load times.
Einstein + Tableau (Business Science)
The latest figures show that Salesforce Einstein generates $152+ billion predictions every day.
Through the ever-strengthened partnership with Salesforce, Tableau got access to Einstein (Salesforce’s AI capabilities), which paved the way for a new class of AI-powered analytics. “Business Science” equips more people with governed, no-code AI-like predictions, what-if scenario planning, and guided model building. Even data novices can look beyond the ‘what’ of their data, and see ‘what could be’.
Brining Einstein capabilities into CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM) will surface actionable insights directly in the Salesforce workflow:
- Einstein Discovery Text Clustering: Leverages machine learning (ML) models to extract keywords from large text fields to quickly reveal hidden insights.
- Einstein Discovery Bias Detection: Now for multiclass models, this expands the use cases for multi-class models by rooting out bias by variable, preventing the need to retrain an entire model.
Model Builder
Tableau is on a mission to democratize data science – to take what is technical and expensive, and bring it to the masses.
Data science involves a series of steps – connect data, prepare data, model data, initialize data, and then repeat over again.
Tableau realized that they were missing one piece of the puzzle. After all, Tableau can already connect to hundreds of data sources out of the box, and prepare and wrangle data easily with Tableau Prep. Plus, it offers the best data visualization in the world.
The missing piece is the ability to build models and make predictions within Tableau. Model Builder will plug this gap, enabling you to build and consume predictive models using the Einstein Discovery engine – a proven AI technology that Tableau is integrating into its technology, and opening it up to a tremendous number of use cases.
Availability and Promotions
- Tableau Cloud (Tableau Online reintroduced) is available now.
- There will be an enterprise bundle that includes Advanced Management and Slack, “put data at the center of every conversation” (coming soon, TBA).
- Tableau is partnering with Snowflake to offer an extended trial which includes Tableau Plus licenses for Snowflake customers.
- Tableau’s new capabilities (featured in this article) will be available by the end of 2022.