Tableau Software Announces General Availability of Tableau 5.0

Cornell University and Primeline benefit from new active business dashboards, improved scalability and over 60 new features

SEATTLE — June 2, 2009 — Tableau Software, the global leader in rapid-fire business intelligence software, today announced the general availability of Tableau 5.0, the next generation of the Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server product suite. With more than 60 new features, Tableau 5.0 helps businesses of all sizes see and understand their data better than ever. New dashboard and interactive visualization capabilities, along with improved scalability and performance make Tableau 5.0 ideal for large business intelligence deployments. Customers such as Cornell University and Primeline are among the first to experience the benefits of this release. Tableau 5.0 is available for free download at http://www.tableausoftware.com/trial.

“Imagine every person in your organization making better, faster business decisions by using live, active dashboards on the Web. Imagine them—with no special training—drilling through trends, finding stories in data and sharing information,” said Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau Software. “With Tableau 5.0, all of this and more is possible, and the software supporting this can be up and running in minutes and can scale to thousands of users.”

Active Dashboards

Tableau 5.0 now offers unparalleled capabilities to create active dashboards and interactive visualizations that enable people anywhere in an organization to track and explore their most important metrics. With just a few clicks, Tableau business dashboards give users the ability to highlight and filter related data—known as brushing and linking. Users can share and follow emerging stories in their data using guided analytics that include links to other dashboards, reports and applications. But unlike complex business intelligence software, ordinary users with just a minimum of experience can set up active dashboards and interactive visualizations that deliver information to thousands of people.

“By definition, interacting with and exploring data by using interactive visualization requires only the most intuitive of tasks, such as clicking on a pie wedge, or circling the dots on a scatter plot,” said Kurt Schlegel, VP of Research, Gartner. “Since interactive visualization is actually fun to use—more fun than a spreadsheet, that is—it will drive much wider adoption. For the most part, interactive visualization can be added to a BI platform architecture without a significant investment.”

With the enhancements found in Tableau 5.0 people can now:

  • Build dashboards that access multiple sources of data as well as highlight and filter across those diverse data sources.
  • Use an interactive data visualization in a dashboard to filter all other data visualizations within a dashboard.
  • Filter time-series data using automatically calculated relative time periods (e.g., last quarter, this week, etc.).
  • Aggregate and minimize data on-the-fly without losing analytical resolution through smart extracts.
  • Launch other software applications with one click or even a mouse-hover.
  • Add advanced mapping geographies to customize geographic analysis.
  • Copy and paste data directly into Tableau from a browser or other applications.

Primeline, a provider of promotional products and services that employs more than 400 people, uses Tableau 5.0 to conduct sales analysis. “Tableau’s new active dashboards take our sales analysis to the next level. We have an unprecedented ability to manipulate our data in real-time so we can better understand what is happening between regions, categories, by SKU, by color, by customer, by vendor, etc.,” said Rick Brenner, president and CEO. “We can filter and highlight patterns on a dashboard with just with a click and share the information throughout our organization. Tableau 5.0 has literally changed the game.”

Improved Scalability and Enterprise Performance

With significant upgrades to scalability, performance and ease of maintenance, Tableau Server 5.0 can scale to meet the demands of nearly any environment. Load can be distributed to multiple servers to support thousands of users; companies can easily add more hardware to their Tableau Server environment as needed. Along with enhanced multithreading, distributing server load means simultaneous users have no delays in working with their view. And new management and monitoring tools make it easier for IT staff to track and support their Tableau Server.

Initial scalability testing performed in the Tableau development labs demonstrates that the server is highly capable in handling a large population of users. For example, a 5-machine configuration running on commodity hardware can support a user community of more than 2,000 people.

Other enterprise enhancements include:

  • Scheduled updates of the data used in Tableau results. By pre-collecting the data used in any Tableau view, the server provides a high-performance experience while offloading the query load from the source database.
  • Secure access to the server is provided by support for SSL, particularly useful for extranet deployments.
  • Improved database performance when working with large databases. This includes special optimizations, such as join logic, for Teradata and Oracle connections.
  • Access to data anywhere—people can work offline with exactly the data they need in extracts. Extracts can be automatically refreshed and synchronized.
  • Automated server administration activities, such as user management, with the server command line utility.

Cornell University’s 11 colleges have been using Tableau Desktop and Server for the last two years as a part of its Key Performance Indicator (KPI) project, which is designed to assess and measure the state of business. Cornell’s KPI team has realized up to a 75 percent reduction in report development time, and has delivered 10 times more work while using 50 percent fewer man hours. Also, prior to adopting Tableau, Cornell’s various colleges could not easily share performance information. Now, Cornell’s leadership can seamlessly share insights about the school’s operation.

“Tableau is the pivotal vehicle for our KPI deployment across the Cornell colleges and is in widespread use by deans, VPs, and Business Officers. The time savings in report development is so significant that our technical team is focusing on deploying data and metrics in additional functional areas much sooner than anticipated,” said Cindy Sedlacek, technical lead for the KPI Initiative and director of data administration and reporting for Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. “And now our extensive testing of Tableau 5.0 has demonstrated that we’ll deliver an even better solution to our users. The scalability enhancements are helping us deploy a better, more responsive business intelligence system. Tableau adoption continues to be so successful across the entire campus that our biggest challenge is facilitating and guiding a digital democracy. What a nice change from typical BI platforms!”

More than 60 New Features

Tableau 5.0 has over 60 new features. Additional capabilities include wildcard quick filters, dual axis visualizations, search within quick filters, data portability and customized data details. A full list of new features and upgrades is listed here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/newfeatures.

“Business intelligence and data visualization technologies can help companies stay ahead in tough economic times, especially if they have the power to work with massive amounts of data and can be used by large numbers of people,” said Chabot. “Now with Tableau 5.0, organizations can end the tyranny of slow and expensive BI roll-outs and enter the new world of easy, rapid-fire business intelligence.”

About Tableau Software

Tableau Software is the leading provider of fast analytics and rapid-fire business intelligence software and one of the 50 fastest growing software companies in the U.S. Its award-winning applications can be downloaded at http://www.tableausoftware.com/trial. They enable anyone to easily create and share interactive data visualizations, business dashboards and analytics and can scale to organizations of virtually any size or reach. Information regarding Tableau’s popular data visualization conference July 20-23 is available at http://conference.tableausoftware.com.

Contact:
Sterling Communications
Chris Warfield
cwarfield@sterlingpr.com
+1-206-388-5758

Elissa Fink
Tableau Software
efink@tableausoftware.com
+1-206-633-3400