 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's The Cube at Tableau Conference 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Welcome back everybody, we're here live at the Tableau Conference 2014 in Seattle, Washington. I'm Jeff Kelly with Wikibon, you're watching The Cube. So we've been covering a lot of topics here at the show, but one of the really important topics is the kind of the ecosystem that's being built around Tableau. That includes certainly the on the infrastructure side, the database side, but also there's an ecosystem growing around professional services and consulting to help Tableau customers kind of get the most out of their investment in Tableau software. We're joined now by one of those professional services firms. We've got Dan Murray, director of business intelligence from Interworks, as well as Thomas Minnick, business intelligence consultant. Welcome guys to The Cube. Thank you. So, yeah, we were talking briefly before we went on and when we think about Tableau kind of the, one of the first things people think is well, self-service business intelligence, data visualization. I don't have to go to IT, I can be just an average user and get the most out of the product. But that said, there's companies like yours that are emerging and in fact, you guys have been around quite a while. We'll talk a little bit about the history, but talk a little bit about generally speaking, the value proposition that you bring to the Tableau environment. Yeah, Interworks was principally designed for building around Tableau's ecosystem, products and services. So, we started doing work with Tableau seven years ago. I was a customer and was a speaker at the very first conference and had a success with the product and I thought, this is a brilliant tool. Everyone needs it, they just don't know it yet. And I thought, certainly there are gonna be issues that crop up because data is ugly. It's not in the same place. The structure of the data doesn't support what the client wants. So, we thought about starting it within Interworks because we knew the founder of Interworks, Bayfar Jahan Chahi, was a good friend of mine. I had hired Interworks to do work in my prior life. They always did a great job. And they had already all these skillsets surrounding Tableau. We could do custom web development work, custom software work. We built our own SaaS products that are branded under different brands. So, we understand that. We knew hardware. So, we needed a server array set up. You wanna put it in the cloud. We knew network topology. Just about everything that hardware related that surrounds Tableau. And the easy part was databases in Tableau. So, it was relatively simple to train the team in those technologies. Well, so, and you were the first partner. You were telling me earlier. So, you and Christian, talk a little bit. Tell us a little bit about that first interaction and kind of the response from Tableau and maybe how that's evolved over the years. Yeah, well, what happened was, is that a guy named Deepak Goki, who was a sales guy at the time, was managing my account. And we had had this really very fast success with Tableau. And he said, well, could you come and tell that story at our first conference? Cause nobody's ever actually done what you did before. So, I came and gave this talk at the conference and during the day, during the event, I thought, I'm not getting through to people. They all look so bored. But that night, there was a party and at least half the people that came up to me and said, we need to do what you did. And then, Christian Chabot and Chris Stolti came and talked to me for an hour and I thought, wow, I felt like a rock star. And I went home and started getting phone calls from people saying, I so and so heard your talk and said, you could probably help me. And I resisted it for about nine months and then I realized I just need to quit my job and do this because it was just a lot of fun. And so, that was the genesis of InterWorks getting into this. It was a crazy customer that wanted to be a consultant and Bayfar just believed the vision. So, yeah, talk a little bit about specifically some of the things that you're doing. So, you're helping both on the kind of administration side as well as on the actual user who's interacting with the data? Yeah, well, we do a lot of different services. The starting point is usually training. We do a lot of trainings, both public forums and customized trainings for large companies. If you want to get 25 people trained, it's a lot less money to do customized onsite training than send everybody to a public class. So, we do a lot of training, which usually ends up leading to questions like, could you help us build the first series of dashboards? Sure, we can do that. Could you tell us how we need to set up Tableau server? What kind of hardware we need? Can you help us configure it? Sure, we can help you with that. We would like to embed this on a website. Can you do that? Yeah, you can do that. Can you hack the XML stream out of that and change the banner ads surrounding our web embed? Sure, we can do that. In some cases, could you just do all of it and put it in the cloud for us and just run everything? And we've had some companies just literally give us their whole BI initiative and we run it for them. So, we're accustomed to providing a lot of services. We sort of have a CIO and a CAN service We actually have a small bank in the northeast that we are their IT. Their employees don't know that we aren't in their buildings. They just call a number and we answer their questions and deal with whatever problems they have. So, we literally do everything surrounding Tableau and Tableau and we love the product. Well, Clio, I think I've certainly gotten the sense that everybody here at this conference loves the product. It's one of these conferences you go to and we cover a lot of shows here on theCUBE and we go to a lot of the big industry shows for HP and IBM and others and you don't get the kind of excitement and enthusiasm that you see at Tableau. The only other show I could think of, I think the Splunk show we did was a similar kind of vibe but it's definitely different than your traditional IT show here. The closest analogy I can think of is it's almost like an Apple event where the people that go to an Apple event just love Apple's products and I think it's even stronger in Tableau. The people that come to these conferences and I've probably been to 12 or 13 of them just love the tool and I met people at the first conference that I've been talking to every week since then and I noticed most of them are in bigger jobs now making more money in more interesting companies. Well, yeah, we were talking about that as well. John Furrier, my co-host was mentioning how people are basing their careers around Tableau now and they're really building up the skill set and being specialists in this area and you're seeing this whole ecosystem of professionals build up around to build their career on this. Yeah, well the Zen masters are probably the best example of that because there's 20 of us and everybody's a little different. If you want to do survey data, you go to Steve Wexler because he knows more about survey data with Tableau than anyone. You want to learn about table calculations? You call Joe Mako because Joe Mako lives, reads table calculations. You want to look at social media streams? You go to Andy Kreebel at Facebook. All these guys love Tableau and they're great at specific ways of using Tableau. So, Thomas, you're out in the field. You're talking to customers every day. What are some of the things you're seeing? You know, share some real world stories if you can. You can not name names if that's an issue but we'd love to hear just really what are people doing out there with Tableau? What are you helping them with and where are you seeing the biggest impact that Tableau's having in the enterprise? Well, I think what people are doing is they are getting to know their data. People have been accumulating data for a long time and kind of looking at the tip of it because they didn't have a way to get a real depth of understanding with it. And just to back up a little bit on the previous subject, that profile of somebody who is changing their career to build that around Tableau is very much my profile. I spent a dozen years in the financial services industry and came across Tableau working to build a portfolio analytics unit at my firm and found that I wanted to do more of my work around Tableau and working with businesses, taking that kind of business acumen to really understand what businesses do, what they need to know in order to make good data-driven decisions is a real passion for me. So coming back to your question, what are real-world examples of what people are doing right now? I'm working with, for example, a large bank that is trying to understand its transactions processing, trying to bring all of the different business units for a global brand, bring the data from those into one place so that the high-level, C-level officers are able to really understand their business and you think about what happened in the financial crisis and when they interviewed CEOs who just, frankly, didn't know, they're being asked about these very complex financial instruments and it was obvious that they didn't know and I think people have learned a lesson from that and they want to know and they're using this tool to bring all that data together and do that. And what are you seeing in terms of Tableau as it's positioned in the market? So you've got Tableau when it emerged years ago, position themselves as kind of the modern alternative to the legacy BI players. What's the environment out there? I mean, while Tableau is having a lot of success, they're still very small compared to the SAP of the world in Oracle. Is that where you're seeing a shift there? Are you seeing, I mean, do a lot of your clients come into you frustrated with some of these other legacy tools and are now looking for a new way? What's kind of the environment you're seeing out there? I think there is definitely frustration with a lot of those other tools and in a lot of cases, they've got several of those solutions all sort of competing with each other. But Dan, I think for somebody who's got a great perspective on the industry would probably give you a... Well, I mean, a few years ago, Tableau was really more of a bandit tool that snuck in the back door. The server product up until version six really couldn't scale the massive data. So most of the conversations we had were with marketing people and sales people and operating people that really were using their own data on a laptop in spreadsheets. I think Tableau just was easier for them to do the analysis more quickly and more meaningfully. But that started changing three years ago because Tableau reinvented it and came up with a really marvelous extract engine. They kept adding more and more connectors. It was able to scale. I mean, I was at a very large federal government agency doing a class and I remember the first time I did this. It was 300 million records. I extracted it and it was very slow connected to this supposedly wonderfully tuned database. During lunch, I extracted 300 million records, came back and the latency went to about a second. And I thought, this is amazing. And it was running on a 32-bit operating system on a $1,000 laptop that fast. And that's when I realized, wow, I can go and talk to big companies now because this tool scales. Yeah, well, so the thing, I think my first Tableau conference, it was probably three, four years ago. And the thing you would hear, and granted a lot of this was being spread by competitors, but that Tableau was more of a toy and not an enterprise tool or technology. Yeah, it can't do this, it can't do that. So I think what you're saying is they've clearly added some of those capabilities that the enterprise requires that they're going to deploy this thing across the user base. It scales. It has a good data governance model. In fact, it's very, I think the best one, it's very flexible. You can connect directly to a data source or extract or any sort of variant in between. So they've addressed all of those issues that their competitors used to use against them. Those are no longer valid arguments. And the other thing they've done brilliantly, take Excel for an example. How many times when a new version of Excel comes out that it takes you a month to learn what used to take you two seconds to do? Because the interface has completely changed. Tableau's looks almost identical to the way it looked when I started using it eight years ago. It really hasn't changed in appearance. So it's gotten to be a more complex and deeper product on the back end, but the front end is still simple. Well, that could be, so let me just push it out a little bit. The flip side of that is, does it look a little dated? Does it need an update? Because the data has always been the center of the attention in tablet. The real brilliance of this tool, and I've done this many times, if you go and demonstrate this to a group of people that have never seen it before, the same thing always happens. 15 minutes into the discussion, they've forgotten it's a sales call. They're so enthralled with the data itself. They physically move closer to the screen. They start asking a lot of questions very excitedly. If we're using their data, which is the best way to demo it, they just start asking lots and lots of questions. And I've done this many times. I've walked into places where they had no intention of buying software that day, and they end up buying $15,000 or $20,000 worth of software because they just loved what they saw. So Tableau itself sort of fades in the background and the data becomes the star. And you're able to articulate things with Tableau that people wouldn't even think of asking about. So this discovery aspect of it is one of the most powerful stories that Tableau has to tell. It's when someone did something completely unexpected that ended up saving them millions of dollars or garnering higher market share or more profitability. And it's usually those questions that no one thought of asking, that the data just emerged with the information. Yeah. I'd like to get both your takes on Tableau software, the company. So we heard in the keynote yesterday from Christian Chabot that they're gonna invest really heavily in R&D over the next two years. I think he said more in R&D in the next two years than they invested in the previous 10. What is your take on that strategy? Is that the right strategy for Tableau at this point in their growth? This is why Tableau has become a leader because they're the only software I've seen in the last 30 years where they're making major releases to the product every 12 to 15 months. I mean, it's hard to write a book on Tableau. Yeah, we're gonna get to the book. I really wanna write about that. You have to write it in nine months and you have to get it to the publisher and get it out as quickly as possible because they're maintaining a very, very difficult development pace and they've consistently done that for the last eight years. So for me, it's really exciting to think what Tableau will be like in two years from now. And I think their value in the market is because they're independent. They wanna connect to everyone's stack, not one stack. And the reality that most, especially large companies have is that their data isn't all in one place. It's in 10 places. And think about small companies now, the amount of data that's generated just from clickstream. And how do you integrate that with your own internal proprietary data? Tableau enables that. So the argument that it's, oh, it's a charting engine is really misses the mark in a wide way. It's a discovery engine. It allows you to articulate things much more quickly and in ways you can't do with any other tool. Thomas, what was your take on the keynote and some of the announcements specifically? I'd love to get your take on Project Elastic and their whole focus on the mobile. They talked a little bit about really rewriting Tableau for the tablet experience. So on a big picture, as a user, as a consultant, I bet you're very excited about the R&D investment. But specifically around mobile, is that an important area for your customers? What's your take on the mobile strategy at? I mean, it depends on who the customer is. Sure, these days. I mentioned one before that the data doesn't go outside the building and so for them, it's not going to be important. But definitely there are a lot of folks, we're doing a fair amount of work right now with Salesforce and that clearly is an opportunity for mobile and we're talking about people who are in the field and need to be able to interact with that information in real time. So I think that that is huge. One of the initiatives that I did in my former firm was working with portfolio managers to have more or less real-time access to portfolios on the go. So they're going into a meeting with a client and they can check on the iPad and be able to walk in and say, this is where we are year to date to five minutes ago. And the use cases for tablets are a little different too because they tend to be very situational and immediate sort of data. For example, you could be somebody in a distribution company, you're out on the warehouse floor and you want to look up where four different locations where that part might be. And so the use is just a little different and it tends to mean that the dashboards are more focused on a single area than it would be if you were, say, a C-level executive that wants the operating dashboard for the business. Right, so they're more operational in the sense of a frontline worker who's got a specific task they're trying to achieve versus a CEO who's looking at big-picture trends in their business. Right, exactly. So we're close on time, but Dan, I wanted to get your take on Tableau as a partner. So as they're growing at this incredible pace, I think they added 2,200 customers last quarter, revenue last quarter is up 80%, something like that. So they're growing extremely fast. They have huge ambitions. I mean, we've asked, we had a few folks from Tableau on, we asked, you know, what do you see as the total available market here? And they're like, well, there's 55 million corporations. We think every single one of them should be a Tableau customer. So they've got huge ambitions. They're growing really quickly. One of the things they're really known for, of course, is being very customer-focused. They listen to their customers probably as good as any enterprise software company I've come across. As they scale, they're going to have to rely on partners such as yourselves and others to pick up some of that slack because as you're scaling like that, you just can't keep your customer focus quite as tight. What do you think about Tableau as a partner and helping you serve your customers in a way that kind of fits with this whole Tableau culture? Well, obviously we love Tableau. It's created a lot of business for us. Tableau sells a lot of our other services because there's such a high jaw drop factor with Tableau. We walk in and in an hour show a client something that they just want after that. And the Tableau is the easy part. The wants typically get into all the other things that we do. So we really enjoy working with Tableau because it opens doors. The other thing about Tableau that's amazing to watch, when I first started this business, the math in my mind was, well, there's maybe 800 million copies of Excel out there. If 10% of those people have Tableau, that's a pretty big market. And I believe that Tableau is years away from cresting. I mean, it's going to grow at this pace for a long time. And then the partner network as well, Tableau changed completely four years ago and wanted to encourage a partner network. And I went to the first partner conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. There were 165 partners there and there were only 150 customers at the first Tableau conference not too many years ago. So it's just exploded. Yeah. So you've written a book. Tell us about the book. I have written a book. Yeah, so hold that for the crowd to see. It's a book. Hold up a little higher so we get that on screen. Okay. It's a how-to book on Tableau. It's sort of intended for two user types. The one would be I've never used Tableau before and I want to learn how it works. So you could start at page one and by the end of the book you've gone through pretty much everything you need to know. The other use case is for more experienced users because there's things that are tricks that you learn from using a tool for seven or eight years that aren't necessarily written down. So there's little bits in there for more experienced users as well. And is it both on the, again, on the user side as well as the administrator side? Yes, there's eight chapters on desktop. There's three chapters on the server. And then I've already signed a contract for a second edition that'll go through version nine and we'll add a lot more about the REST API and other new features that have just come out in the last year. Okay, great, Tableau, your data. Where can people find that book? It's here at the conference. You can come by our booth or you can buy a copy in the store or go on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You can buy it there as well. Okay, very good. Well, Dan Murray, Thomas Minick, guys, thanks so much for coming on. Really interesting story. Hope you'll stay in touch. We'll have you on theCUBE again next year when we're back at Tableau Conference. Great, thanks for having us. Absolutely, good luck. Thanks everybody. We'll be right back after the short break with our next guest live here in Seattle, the Tableau Conference.