![]() But Tableau continues to grow swiftly in a competitive space. Salesforce is paying a premium of about 13 times Tableau's nearly $1.2 billion in 2018 sales - for a company that hasn't posted an annual profit in four years. Salesforce found early success with the software-as-a-service model, in which companies subscribe to its web-based customer relationship management tools, rather than buying a license and running software on local servers. Tableau's software helps people make modern graphs and charts from enormous data sets without the need of a computer science Ph.D. ![]() The combination gives Salesforce what Benioff boasted would be "the leading products in (the) most important categories underlying digital transformation" - specifically, data analytics and visualization tools from Tableau and a broad suite of customer engagement services from Salesforce. "I think it's very defensive," he said of the acquisition. "They're increasingly moving up the software stack" to provide business analytics and other software services on a foundation of cloud computing power and data storage. "Amazon and Microsoft have these tremendous cloud footprints," said Paul Condra, a tech analyst with Seattle-based PitchBook Data. The giants of cloud computing have built capabilities that compete directly with the likes of Tableau and Salesforce, driving more industry consolidation as other enterprise software players look for scale and differentiation. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff keeps building his digital transformation empire BloombergĪs for Tableau, he said, "We're going to plan to put that thing on overdrive."Īpart from the local impact, the deal underscores how Seattle-area tech giants Amazon and Microsoft have come to dominate a new model of business computing. It already has more than 1,000 employees of its own here, and Benioff said he's long wanted to make the Seattle area "a strategic part of Salesforce." That reference to HQ2 - an abbreviation made famous by Seattle-based Amazon in its search for a second headquarters - suggests the role Benioff imagines for Salesforce in the region. ![]() That's going to be our HQ2, if you will," Benioff said, speaking to financial analysts on a conference call. "With Tableau, Seattle will become our second headquarters of Salesforce. Recently, the Bay came calling in the form of Marc Benioff's San Francisco-based Salesforce, which agreed to a $15.7 billion all-stock purchase of Tableau, the second-largest acquisition of a Washington company. In 2004, when Tableau Software was still a tiny spinout from Stanford University, the co-founders fell in love with Seattle and decided to build their data visualization software company here rather than in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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