Zynga Games & Tableau Featured in TDWI Article About Zynga's Massive Analytics Strategy

Today Linda Briggs over at TDWI posted an article, Q&A: Zynga Stresses Visual Access to Its Vast Data Volumes, about her Q&A session with Ken Rudin, Director of Analytics for Zynga Games. Ken has a deep analytics background and is well-known in the business intelligence world.

Now in his capacity with Zynga, he has an incredibly interesting environment to solve a key strategic task - he's got Tableau on top of one of the world's largest data warehouses (which happens to be built by Vertica) to help the Zynga team make their games even more successful. They're probably most well-known for their Facebook games like Farmville (personally, I'm a huge fan of Scramble on the iPhone).

In his interview with Linda, Ken makes it clear that doing analysis on top of a massive data warehouse is just the beginning. One of my favorite quotes is "if you're doing analysis, you might be generating fantastic insights, but if you distribute your results to people and they aren't able to understand it, they won't actually do anything differently.“

In fact, Ken goes on to say a lot of great things, particularly about Tableau. See below for a few more. Clearly, Tableau with Vertica is rapid-fire BI at its best.

• “Tableau makes it easy to uncover insights, and then picks the best way to present them visually so they can be easily understood. We can now put the data out there and I don't have to go and talk to 250 people individually to explain it to them. An intuitive chart does it for me.“
  
  
  
• “Many of the other tools we looked at required you to either work with just a subset of the data or pull a full copy of the data into its own local storage. With the first approach, you don't get all the data, and due to our data size, the second approach wasn't feasible. Tableau is one of the few that goes back to the source, the main database itself, when you issue a query, versus having to pull over a cube.“
  
  
  
• “Tableau has all the analysis we need... I'd rather have good analytics and great communication than great analytics and poor communication because in the latter case, you get nothing out of it. I don't mean to imply that Tableau is at all weak on the analytics part of it. They do everything we need and more.“
  
  
  
• “Tableau is a great tool that allows you to tell great stories...“
  
  
  
• “(Tableau) makes it much easier to get people to act. My fundamental philosophy is, if you're doing analysis, you might be generating fantastic insights, but if you distribute your results to people and they aren't able to understand it, they won't actually do anything differently.“
  
  
  
• “Using Tableau, we show people what needs to change and what the outcome is going to be. It's all there... “

5.2 Release: New Data Connections and Enhanced Maps!

There's another new release of Tableau - 5.2. For all the details, see our "New Features" web page.

With this release, we've enhanced our maps with new styles and more detailed international maps and we've added new data connections.

New Map Styles

• Default map style updated. Tableau’s default map style has been updated with new font treatments and subtle changes to the colors used for water, land, parks and urban areas. There's more ability to control map options to such as whether map attributes like country and state borders appear on the map.
• New gray-scale map style. As an alternative to the default maps, Tableau 5.2 has a muted gray-scale map with white water areas. Looks fantastic in map visualizations, especially in places like the San Francisco Bay Area and the U.K. where water is an important part of the landscape.
• Increased level of detail worldwide. The new maps include increased depth coverage for zooming into all parts of the world. Tableau now zooms to the following levels:
  - U.S. and Canada - Down to very close to street level
  - Western Europe - Down to street level
  - Australia/ New Zealand - Down to street level
  - Rest of world - Down to city view
  

Check out the video describing the map enhancements - directly from the desk of our CEO Christian Chabot.

You can also check out a live example about the history of the world cup in our Tableau Public Gallery.

More Data Connectivity

Tableau Desktop Professional now connects to even more data sources.

• Sybase IQ is an analytics server which combines a column-based architecture, patented data compression and indexing technology, and flexible scalability in all dimensions (computing power, storage, and number of users) to deliver mission-critical business intelligence, analytics and data warehousing solutions on any standard hardware and operating system.
• Microsoft® PowerPivot is an Excel add-in for modeling and analyzing data in extremely large Excel worksheets of up to 2 gigabytes, literally millions of rows of data. PowerPivot for SharePoint makes these worksheets available to others in your organization by serving this data from SharePoint. Tableau connects to PowerPivot files that have been published to SharePoint 2010 servers.
• The ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB) is a columnar, massively parallel database for data warehousing, predictive analytics, and advanced business insight. Tableau connects to PADB version 2 and higher.
• Greenplum is a massively parallel processing (MPP) database designed for data warehousing and large-scale analytics. Tableau now supports connecting to Greenplum databases version 3.3 and higher.
• ODBC is a publicly defined standard for database connectivity and many database vendors make ODBC drivers available for connecting to their databases. ODBC drivers used with Tableau are required to meet the ODBC Version 3.0 compliance level.

Check out the video showing how to use the new connections - especially PowerPivot.

We sincerely hope you're pleased with all the new features. Download your copy via our Customer Download Center or check out our free trial.

News Round-Up: Articles We Hope You Saw

I love keeping up with our industry and particularly reading what people think about Tableau. But there are more blog posts, tweets and good old-fashioned articles than time to read them. So I've highlighted a few recent articles where Tableau has been in the news, including a feature in The Economist.

In no particular order, here are some of my favorites:

• The Economist - Show Me New Ways of Visualizing Data: The Economist, one of my personal favorite magazines for its no-nonsense point of view and clear writing, did a special report on data visualization. Tableau is mentioned as doing "for visualizing data what word-processing did for text, allowing anyone to manipulate information creatively."


• Life Hacker - Tableau Public Brings Your Boring Data to Life: Another personal favorite of mine is LifeHacker, a great site for learning about new tools and generally better ways of doing things. They had a nice write up about Tableau Public.


• Fast Company - Infographic of the Day: Google's "Data for a Changing World": Fast Company covers Google's efforts at making public data easier to understand but notes they're far from the first. They noted Tableau Public and said it "intelligently suggests the right data visualization."


• Visual Business Intelligence from Stephen Few - Tableau Public: A Powerful New Tool for Democratizing Data: If you've been in or around the data visualization/business intelligence industry for any length of time, you already know Stephen Few and his blog Visual Business Intelligence. Stephen did a review of Tableau and commented, "I believe in providing people with simple tools for exploring and analyzing data. Tableau Public makes this possible in a way that is more analytically powerful than any free service that’s been offered to date."


• ReadWriteWeb - Twitter Analysis: Influencers Still Signing Up; Lots of Followers Doesn't Equal Lots of Lists: ReadWriteWeb is an incredibly useful site that keeps its readers informed on internet-oriented technologies. We worked with them and Damon Cortesi of TweetStats to produce an analysis of influential people using Twitter. Not surprisingly, the post itself was highly tweeted.


• Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) - Tableau Selected as 2010 CODiE Awards Finalist: The prestigious SIIA organization selected Tableau as a finalist in 2 award categories: “Best Software Development Solution” and “Best Business Software Solution."




Filed under: news tableau

Your thoughts?

Gartner’s Customer Survey Results: Overall Customer Experience

As you may know, Tableau recently was included on the 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. (You can see the overall Magic Quadrant here.) About one week later, Gartner came out with research notes detailing the survey results from customer ratings of their BI vendors on issues ranging from product quality to functionality. Because those surveys zero in on specific characteristics, we believe they can be as useful as the Magic Quadrant positioning itself.

This blog entry is first in a series of four looking at some of the details behind the Magic Quadrant and trying to understand why Gartner evaluates vendors the way they do.

Above is an image (created by Gartner not using Tableau's applications) based on customer ratings of all vendors on two factors: “Combined Customer Support and No Software Problems Score” and “Sales Experience Score.” We're very pleased with our position on the graphic and specifically with how our customers evaluated us on the two factors. We work really hard at both those areas and we’re grateful that our customers recognize that. We also know that from release to release, things can change. So if there’s something we’re doing or not doing, please let us know. We’re all ears.

The “Sales Experience Score” position is interesting. Tableau’s sales model is not typical – we sell primarily over the web and over the phone. It appears customers like that too. But we’ll keep tuning our model until it’s even better. Again, if you’ve got feedback, we welcome it.

Thank you to the customers who participated in the Gartner research; we can’t tell you how much we appreciate it.

To get a copy of each of the 3 Gartner reports, please go to here. And if you want more insight, attend the 2010 Gartner Business Intelligence Summit. It’s in Las Vegas, April 12-14 2010. Tableau will be there.

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

5.1 Release: New Graph Type, Better Publishing, Performance Improvements & Capabilities To Share Public Data

We're burning the midnight oil getting our website updated tonight (last night by the time you read this). That's because we've got a great new release for you, Tableau 5.1, that is loaded with ingenious features. For all the details, see our "New Features" web page.

Probably the most exciting new capability is the ability for Tableau 5.1 desktop versions to save your public data to the web for embedding in your blog and website -- all for free. The service is called "Tableau Public" and we hope you'll see Tableau visualizations popping up in your favorite blogs and websites.

We're excited about these capabilities to publish public data (or data you want to make public) to the web. People at Tableau are big believers in helping people answer questions more easily with data by making it more visual and more interactive. Instead of viewing static charts or tables, people reading a blog or website can interact with data and answer their own questions. It's a way a blogger or writer can give their readers exactly the content they want. If you want, you can even embed someone else's Tableau Public viz in your own blog or website. Or you can pull down the workbook file and create your own viz.

During our beta, we saw some great examples of people publishing their public data to the web:

• UNESCO is carrying interactive visualizations on deprivation and marginalization in education for dozens of countries.
• OECD showed the worldwide picture of labor force indicators by gender and age.
• The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has made the Haiti earthquake disaster more understandable by visualizing healthcare points of service.
• Seattle Bubble blogs about the housing market in Seattle.
• Stephen Few wrote an article about Information Visualization, Design, and the Arts and created this Tableau dashboard as an example. I've embedded this one below.

Other great features of this release include

• Bullet graphs - a graph type invented by Stephen Few and designed for performance monitoring. In fact, Stephen recorded a special video at our request to tell you more about bullet graphs.
• Reference bands and extensions of reference lines - new reference band and line capabilities let you draw attention to key data points like never before.
• Rich formatting - format annotations, titles, tool tips, etc. with rich text formatting. Change the font, size, style, color and alignment.
• Reduced bottlenecks in Tableau Server - a number of performance improvements have been made all across the application including the initial loading of a view, materialized calculations, groups and bins on extracts, and an overall more efficient use of caching.
• New Tableau Server interface - a new interface makes it easier to use and to find views.
• Windows 7 support and more - we're officially supporting Windows 7, Teradata users and Essbase users will find improvements for those data sources, and built-in error reporting so we can learn about issues earlier and more easily.

I sincerely hope you're pleased with all the new features. Download your copy via our Customer Download Center or check out our free trial.

Dallas Cowboys Go Big with Tableau

Lately, the Dallas Cowboys story has generated a lot of news and activity.

We've seen news coverage in ComputerWorld magazine, a featured story on network television in Dallas, a video case study on TechTarget and even in our own case study with our partner Teknion.

The Story in 3 Minutes

Nothing like asking a former MTV video producer to look at well over 40 minutes of footage and boil it down to the essential 3 minutes. Check out the results in YouTube.

Tableau on TV

If you love football, you probably know the Cowboys won Sunday November 7. Did you also know that their business teams scored a big win too?

After Sunday's game, Dallas Cowboys Merchandising COO Bill Priakos was featured on an NBC news video feature in Dallas about the success Bill, his merchandising team and the IT team are having with Tableau. Check out the embedded video.

The video tells the story of the Dallas Cowboys’ huge merchandising success and their use of Tableau. In fact, the voice over from the reporter mid-way through the story is: “Another key element is something called Tableau. Software that is so sophisticated that we can’t show it to you on the screen. We can tell you that it tracks every Cowboy item in real-time.”

You've got to love the irony of a highly visual business intelligence application (Tableau) being something so sophisticated that it can't be shown on screen.

Cowboys in ComputerWorld

Eric Lai of ComputerWorld recently told the Cowboys story in his article “BI visualization tool helps Dallas Cowboys sell more Tony Romo jerseys.”

Cowboys Merchandising COO Priakos used vivid words to describe one of his key operational systems that just couldn't deliver integrated reporting and analytics. To quote Bill, "As we were going through the installation, they kept telling me, 'the BI piece is coming.' That turned out to be French for them not really knowing what they were going to do."

But then Bill goes on to describe Tableau. "It has taken a somewhat disappointing software installation on which we had spent multiple millions of dollars, and just by layering this software piece, [Tableau] made it run better, and let us find answers instantly."

For more details, check out the article itself or our blog post.

Cowboys' COO Priakos Video Case Study

We were fortunate to catch Bill on video when he and his team presented at our 2009 Customer Conference. Check out the video.

What I particularly love is when Bill says that a 15 second glance at a Tableau dashboard in the morning replaces 90 minutes of printing reports, making phone calls, etc.

Cowboys Score Big with Tableau Partner Teknion

Finally and perhaps most importantly is the role our partner Teknion played in the Cowboys story. The Teknion team brought the Tableau solution to the Cowboys and then led the Cowboys to rapid success.

Tableau and Teknion together provided real-time reporting and dashboard capabilities that exceeded the Cowboys’ requirements. Systematically and methodically the Teknion team worked side by side with data owners and data users within the Dallas Cowboys to deliver all required functionality, on time and under budget. “Early in the process, we were able to get a clear understanding of what it would take to run a more profitable operation for the Cowboys,” said Teknion Vice President Bill Luisi. “This process step is a key step in Teknion’s approach with any client, and it always pays huge dividends as the implementation plan progresses.”

Check out the case study here.

Thank you, Teradata, for Honoring Tableau as "New Partner" of the Year

Teradata Corporation recently recognized Tableau as its "New Partner" of the year. Announced at its annual Partners conference this last week in Washington, DC, it's quite an honor especially coming from Teradata. Teradata (NYSE: TDC) is the world’s largest company solely focused on raising intelligence through data warehousing, data warehouse appliances, consulting services and enterprise analytics. Teradata is in more than 60 countries. We introduced Tableau connectivity to Tableau last year and we're happy to say that it's having a very strong market impact.

Their partner awards are intended to acknowledge those "organizations whose impact on Teradata’s economic and technological success has been visible and dramatic,” as Darryl McDonald, Teradata chief marketing officer, said. And as such, Tableau is in good company; other software vendors winners included Oracle, SAP, SAS, Microsoft and Informatica. Read more here.

Thank you, Teradata, for the recognition. It's great to work with a partner who also has such a strong focus on helping customers get more from their data and business intelligence analytics.

In-person Tableau Training Now Available From Freakalytics

As easy as Tableau is to learn (just by getting started, attending a web-based course, or watching a video), sometimes there's just no substitute for good old-fashioned in-person training. Getting out of the office and away from the distractions of daily life does wonders for a learning environment.

That's why I'm happy to share information about training courses from our new training partner, Freakalytics. Scheduled courses include:

• Sep 15-17, 2009 – Seattle, Washington
• Oct 06-08, 2009 – New York City, NY
• Oct 20-22, 2009 – Washington, DC (Alexandria, VA)
• Nov 10-12, 2009 – Dallas, Texas

They have already run courses in San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago. Customer feedback has been resoundingly positive!

• "I came here as a Tableau beginner and I am already close to replacing our old financial reporting system with Tableau."
• "I've been using Tableau for almost 2 years and this class made me realize there’s so much more I can do with it."

Attendees rated that they learned in 3 days what may have taken them 4 to 6 months. I audited portions of the first course and agree this is a great way to learn Tableau. Even advanced users found the majority of the course material new or enlightening.

Stephen is a long-time Tableau expert and bona fide analytics guru (including positions at REI, Netflix, SAS, etc.). With the editing help of his wife Eileen (herself a Ph.D.), he wrote the first book about Tableau, "Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software".

Brief course descriptions are below but check out the Freakalytics website. And if you do get the opportunity to attend, please let us know what you think!

Rapid Graphs with Tableau - $875 In this one-day course, you will learn how to create graphs and tables with Tableau to improve the speed and quality of your daily decisions. Topics include thinking analytically, understanding different data types, effective business table and graph design, data access, the power of Show Me! and sharing your work. Each attendee will receive two books, “Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software: Create Intuitive, Actionable Insights in Just 15 Days” by Stephen McDaniel and “Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten” by Stephen Few.


Data Exploration and Effective Dashboards with Tableau - $1450 for 2 days (or $1975 for both courses) In this two-day course, you will learn how to use many of the powerful features of Tableau for data exploration, data management and effective dashboard creation. Topics include understanding common data relationships and the best methods to explore them, the visual perception of data with tables and graphs, dynamic view interaction and navigation, data navigation and advanced data management. Dashboard topics include design principles and best practices. Each attendee will receive two books, “Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software: Create Intuitive, Actionable Insights in Just 15 Days” by Stephen McDaniel and “Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis” by Stephen Few.

CBS Sports Drafts Tableau for Fantasy Football

CBSSports.com wants to make one of the most critical decisions in drafting a fantasy football team easier: choosing a running back. Today, in time for Draft Day, they posted the "Interactive RB selector" - a Tableau viz that lets anyone find and make inspired RB choices.

What's cool is that it's really easy to evaluate running backs. Click on one or more players in the left most upper graphic and see the other graphics change. Or find your favorite player in the "Defensive Matchup" table, click and see where he lands in total Projected Fantasy Points, Receptions and Attempts. Every viz interacts with the other so you get a fast, easy-to-understand view into this important position.

For example, you’ve got the 3rd pick in your draft. The clock is ticking. Matt Forte is available, as you planned and hoped, as he’s projected to be more productive than Turner and D. Williams (who are also available). As you’re about to pull the trigger, you check your Tableau cheat sheet and notice that Turner (awarded last year’s rushing title) is only projected to score 1 less point than Forte. Furthermore, Turner is expected to have the most difficult schedule of the top 5 by far. What if that's not the case? If defenses do something unexpected, Turner's got the upside. Could he then not exceed all expectations? Indecision sets in...

Even if you're not a player, you can still surprise the fantasy football player in your life. Give him (or her) a new, unexpected perspective tonight. You never know where it might lead.