 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE at Tableau Conference 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Hey, welcome back, and we're here live in Seattle, Washington for Tableau's data 14 user conference, technology conference. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Joe, my co-host Jeff Kelly, big data analyst at wikibond.org. And our next guest is Dave Story, the VP of Mobile and Strategic Growth at Tableau Software. No stranger to large-scale infrastructure and creative and at Lucas Films, Adobe, running large-scale sites. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. So we'd love to keynote. Obviously, we go right into the vision. The founders and CEO get up there and talking about the Tableau story, which is incredible for the folks that do know it and folks who don't know it, built a company, built a viable business, got the rocket fuel from the venture capitalist, went public, investing all your cash, still kind of losing money, but you have enough cash in the bank, you're not going to go out of business. Growing like crazy, the Apple event's going on. You, we were talking about the user interface. You were up on stage giving a demo on the iPad live with data that, I mean, I actually was like, that's a canned demo. It has to be a canned demo because it just was so damn easy. You went into email, tapped on that. You had the airdrop to the app and bang, you're playing with data, partying with data and making real analysis. That was not a canned demo or not. Absolutely not canned. Everything I showed on stage was live running code and both the corporate app and our new project Elastic. So take us through the demo and we want to analyze real quick about this project Elastic. Obviously, we love that word Elastic, highly Elastic, horizontally scalable. These are the geek terms that we talk about under the hood in the DevOps community, but the visualization piece is really for the practitioner, ease of use. Take us through the demo and just what was really happening there from an ease of use standpoint and then what was happening under the hood? I think the first thing you have to start with is why are we doing this? And I think the fascinating thing and the thing that got me to go from being CTO at Lucasfilm to going to a business intelligence company was division. The company is on a mission to help the world see and understand its data. And what we're trying to do here is make sure that we broaden that reach. So Tableau has gone and just exploded it from the very top of the pyramid of only data scientists and only the few chosen few. Nerds, Python programmers. Well, and the rich chosen few, the 1% that can actually afford to have a BI department and they can get their questions answered. So that next tier inside a company, most people inside a company even with a sophisticated top-notch BI system aren't being served by it. So what Tableau is doing is expanding the reach into areas where the competitor is non-consumption. From Sandwich Shop to Fortune 100, you guys are looking at that market. Yeah, so what we want to do then with Elastic is say we want to broaden the reach of our mission even further to folks. Most businesses in the US are on average just six employees or less. Think about that. Nobody's going to have an infrastructure, a back office. They barely can afford an accountant. So what most businesses are doing, they're living hand to mouth, they need to get insights really, really quickly and how do they do that? It's interesting, the buzzword we always hear and talk about ourselves too is storytelling, right? Oh yeah, storytelling is the key to success. It makes for good theater, it makes for good marketing but at the end of the day, it's not just a storytelling, it's actually getting the story, getting the data. And iterating through the data is a recursive process that's not a one push button answer. It's a iterative thing. Can you comment on how Elastic Cloud positions into that market for the user? Hey, you know, I want to start playing with my data because I might not know which question to ask. Yeah, well, so I think one of the things that's really great about Elastic is we didn't start saying what visas or what visualizations can we put in? You know, what we were trying to do is say, what do people do when they get a file of data? They need to see it, they need to understand it and explore it and they want to do that really simply. So what Elastic does is it builds on 10 years of experience that we have and observations watching people use data. And what they do right away is they say, I want to look at the categories of my data and I want to see what do I have in here? They need to be able to very quickly explore it. What's even in here? You can't tell the story without knowing what the story is. Yeah, so you don't even know what the landscape is. What questions can I ask? So the first thing we wanted to do is answer that initial question of, what is this data? And then we think about this as like category world is really about questions about what, right? And so what are the questions you ask? Like what data do I have? What happened? What's my top seller? You know, what's been happening a lot? What's the average? What's been happening infrequently? Those are the questions you ask, just naturally. And then we wanted to answer questions about when, right? So we made a time world which comes and it gives you an immediately useful view because people don't have the patience. They want to have answers right away. It gives you an immediately useful view and then you can start to ask when questions and what happened over time questions, right? And so be able to go through your time, be able to open it up. People expect it to be instantaneous, fluid, flowing and that's the kind of experience you want to give people. Yeah, I think certainly people, consumers have come to expect that kind of performance, that kind of intuitive ease of use with applications on their smartphones, on their tablets, so it would make a lot of sense obviously the tableau needs to be there. Talk a little bit about mobile strategic importance to tableau. I talked a little bit in the intro, John and I were talking a little bit about the competitive landscape and obviously there's a lot of competition in the data visualization space and mobile with the iPhone announcement today just kind of highlights the fact that mobile is so critical. Built up to consumer and with the iPad to the enterprise. What's the, how does Tableau look at mobile in terms of a strategic investment area? Right, right. Well, we think it's critically important because that's where people are, right? Tablets are out selling laptops, they're out selling desktops as a category and then smartphones are out selling both of those like dramatically and so that's where people are. Our vision has always been data analytics anywhere and so what we're able to do now as Christian mentioned in the keynote, we've spent 10 years building up the Tableau 8.2 which we released less than three months ago. In the next two years we are on track to spend more on R&D than we have in the preceding 10. So we have the opportunity to invest as a result of our customers liking what we do. We can invest more and so now is the time where we can go back and rethink everything about mobile and you're seeing the beginnings of that with our Tableau mobile for corporate users and with Project Elastic for everyone and just saying, wow, if we go back and rethink this and we bring like a current design mindset how should we build this if we were starting today? And so fundamentally mobile is critical to our future because that's what people need. People are going out more and more often and so the mobile strategy luckily due to the customers voting with their wallets to agree with our vision, we're able to invest a lot more. So you mentioned in the keynote, so is this a complete rewrite of Tableau's previous mobile applications, mobile capabilities? Put this in context. Yeah, so if you look at Tableau mobile which is the app you can get in the App Store today for both Android and iOS, that's an application we launched four years ago and we've made incremental improvements but now we're saying, okay, it's time, let's go for it. And it's really exciting for me. It's part of what drew me to the company is I watched when I was at realtor.com I watched us launch a mobile application and in the subsequent years, since we've launched it in 2010, it's now 70% of the traffic at that site, just the mobile app. Starting from zero. So I think there's gonna be similar movement in corporate customers. And what's been really exciting is I've gotten to go out and visit a lot of those customers and one of them, a very large pharmaceutical company, has issued over 25,000 iPads to its sales force. And think about the change and the change in expectations. I asked them, I said, why did you issue iPads? Why aren't they just carrying laptops? I mean, these things break, et cetera, and they said, you know what? It takes too long to open a laptop and log in. Like literally these reps are going from doctor to doctor. They have four minutes in between appointments. They need to be able to pick something up, tap a few times, and instantly see their information. And so we designed for a use case like that, where I'm on the road, I'm at a hospital or a secure environment, I don't have access. And so we added offline support for the very first time in this upcoming release of Tableau Mobile. And that required a complete rewrite of the app. So in terms of kind of future investment, I'm guessing a large portion of that R&D is going to be mobile related. Now you're also part of your, you're overseeing a lot of the strategic development, right? So in addition to mobile, what are some of the other things we're seeing? I mean, we heard a little bit about the cloud option. I know you announced a Tableau Cloud offering, I think last year around this time. Can you talk a little bit about that role? And maybe where the two convert, the kind of the cloud capability and the mobile, and where those two kind of intersect. Yeah, well, and let me put this keynote in context. So, and I'll do that by saying, we are rethinking the way we do software development from the ground up. Okay, and it's really focused on quality first. And what that allows us to do is to be more predictable and add more features because we're thinking about the whole infrastructure around the software developer. How does that actually happen? And the reason I bring that up, just a quick teaser on that is, we just shipped Tableau 8.2 with massive new features, live storytelling, new maps. We run our own map service now with a completely new data import experience and connections, much more visual, and the same product runs on the Mac. It's not a port, it's actually the same code compiled for Mac and Windows, right? So that was a tremendous undertaking. That launched in the second half of June, okay? It's only been two and a half months. And everything you saw on stage was running code. We are not only moving faster, we are able to invest more and we're getting the scale we need. That's what the strategic growth side of my job means. It's how do we scale so that my vision for our scaling is that Tableau is the best place that any of us in development have ever worked at the scale that we're at. We can't compare to when we were 10 people, right? So but when we're hundreds, when we're 1,000, is it still gonna be the best place to write software you've ever worked at? And we're really serious about that. We're designing new buildings, we're designing the collaboration spaces. I go into the desks and how the drawers work, how the seating, which way it angles in the cafeteria, where our metrics monitors rotate. I mean, we're into it. We really want this to be a collaborative company because we think the best insights come when there's that spark across a very narrow gap between two creative people. Dave, I want to get your perspective on quality and product value. And we were commenting again prior to coming on is that product leadership really is rewarded now in this market more than ever. Given the software cycles are so much faster. I mean, you mentioned kind of a DevOps thing, you mentioned it's all running code. I'm gonna imagine you guys were probably pushing code last night. Yeah, in the cloud. I mean, but still, I mean, this is the models, not six weeks, it's not like six weeks. It's more of a cloud model, okay. And the question that came up on our crowd chat earlier says question for the Tableau community. What is holding us back to what Christian says is fast experimentation. One of the keynote themes was fast experimentation. You were basically demoing it with Project Elastic. That means essentially fast experimentation is get the data, get the story, iterate through it, make discoveries, tell the story, those kinds of things. How does a company do that from a quality standpoint and what product qualities do you guys have the leadership in to do that? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the fundamental thing and if you look at the elastic demonstration that I did today, where I saw the cloud, the crowd light up was when we figured out with a few swipes and taps what the top seller at launch on Monday was. Now why was that? Because what people want is not an interface or a tool or something. They want a flow experience where they're completely immersed and they want to answer questions. And the ability to go question, question, question, question, question like that is just unmatched by anyone. And so that starts with Tableau's fundamental breakthroughs around VizQL and connecting data and visualization. And what we're doing is we're bringing that same knowledge forward through all of our product. So under the hood is some tech and then the user experience is more about the user. That's what you're basically saying. Yeah, well, but the thing is that the tech under the hood was designed with in mind that the user needs to stay in a flow experience. That means sub second response times to radically huge queries. So if you looked at what we're doing in 90 in our next release, we actually showed 180 million taxi rides in the city of New York over the entire year and interactive speeds, asking questions, answering them, you know, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Uber should buy your product. They probably are using your product. We'd love to get your product in with our crowd chat. Running out of time, but I want to get your thoughts on a few things. I want to get your perspective on your vision around the future UI piece of it. Because I think one of the things that you're teasing out here is that in the mind of the user, this new user experience is not about what IT wants. It's really about what users want. You kind of tease it out with looking at the lunch menu for the sandwich shop. What is your vision around the user experience? For Tableau, what can you share is on your innovation strategy and what's around the corner? I know you're public, but you know, just give us a high level overview. Right, right. Well, I think the continuous thing is this flow experience for exploring your data. So whether you're telling a story and you need to understand it and you understand it by asking just one more question. So we're constantly focused on how can we keep the person just right there looking at their data and making that happen. So you saw a lot of innovations about drag and drop analytics right onto the canvas. Editing things right there on the data. And at the same time, we are refactoring pieces all the time. We're constantly replacing pieces of our code to do breakthroughs in speed, in interactivity, and in the simplicity of the experience. And we're getting the hook here, but I want to get one more thought from you because you've been around the block. You've seen cycles of innovation come and go. We're now in one of those creative explosions with technology and growth. There are a lot of guys out there betting their careers on certain platforms. And everyone I talk to says they roll their eyes. I need another tool like a hole in the head. So in the customer environment, there's a ton of inbound noise around. I have this, I have this solution, you have that, competition fud, but people are betting their careers on technology. What would you share with folks out there who are making those career decisions? What they should look for? How they should they evaluate, not just Tableau, other new, cool-looking things that might have hidden costs or consequences. What should you take? Share your vision on people betting their careers. How they should evaluate and look at the new technology. Well, first thing I would do is the user is in more control than ever. So you need to be thinking, I would simply go, what's word of mouth saying? What are existing customers who are like you saying about that technology? And when they talk to it, are they talking about, yeah, I can get my job done? Or are they saying, oh my God, I had no idea I could do all this. Like I'm having so much fun using this, right? And so like when I was working on Photoshop, we had a Photoshop Widows Club for people who got absorbed and sucked into the Photoshop zone. It's the same thing with Tableau. It's one of the things that attracted me to the company and to the vision is people get into it, they get into their data and they can finally get their questions answered. They could never get answered before. You guys have a great product. I love the quote in the keynote. We're going to wrap it up here when they talked about digital photography, cost of film, when that went to zero, the creativity exploded. I think we're seeing that same revolution. Obviously with PostScript, that powered the PC, computing revolution, the data revolution, data first, as we say. Thanks so much, Dave, for coming on theCUBE. This is theCUBE. We're live in Seattle, Washington for Tableau's Data 14. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.