 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. Okay, hello everyone. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the symphony noise. We are here live in Seattle, Washington with Tableau's data 14 conference and it's exciting. A lot of news going on all around the web. Certainly, if you're watching this, you're also well aware of the Apple Live event happening in Cupertino and Silicon Valley. Where all the innovations seem to be around user interface. We're breaking that down, going under the hood here at Tableau's user conference. I'm John Furrier. My co-host this week is Jeff Kelly with Wikibon Chief Analyst and Big Data. Jeff, we're about to kick off two days of coverage here at Tableau. I gotta say, you couldn't ask for a better trend connect by having the Apple event going on live where they introduced the iPhone 6 with huge screens, the iWatch, I posted up on our crowd chat, crowdchat.net slash data 14. Apple, really innovating around what has always been the innovation, the user interface, user experience. We are seeing mobile and cloud really changing the game for everybody and certainly Apple with today's event highlights the Tableau's value proposition which is under the hood, analytics, visualization of data. And the keynote this morning, we heard the CEO talking about PostScript and PostScript, as we know, Steve Jobs and the original Apple really set the stage for typefaces which created the computer revolution. We are now living in a big data revolution and it's so exciting. User experience, this is all about the user experience and making use of the data. That's absolutely right and it is interesting that this show happens to fall on the same day as Apple's announcement around the iPhone. And we heard a lot in the keynote around, well, a couple different areas that I think are really important for Tableau. One is cloud, the other is mobile. So, for Tableau, they're growing very quickly. They have been called the darling of data visualization tool that data scientists love to use, business analysts love to use. Increasingly, business users, people who are not necessarily trained in data visualization or analytics are using Tableau because of the ability to manipulate data very easily. But there are, of course, a lot of competitors hot on their heels as well. You know, when Tableau kind of hit the scene, they position themselves as a modern alternative to more stodgy business intelligence applications like business objects or Cognos. But now that Tableau's been around for a while, they've got competitors that are younger and more maybe arguably more modern than they are. So there's a few areas, as I mentioned, that Tableau really has to focus on, I think, cloud, mobile and the user interface are three of those areas. And we're going to hear a lot about that this week. Well, we're excited to be here. We want to thank Tableau for sponsoring theCUBE to get out here and do the editorial coverage of this great event. And Tableau is really one of those new companies that have emerged out of this revolution around data analytics, cloud, mobile and social. Obviously, with social data, with all kinds of data, internet of things, you name it, data is the new oil, it is the new currency, it is the new value. And what you're seeing here is the revolution of making it usable. The user interface, it's all about the user interface. And again, I'm so excited, Jeff, because we're data geeks here at SiliconANGLE and Wikibon on theCUBE. We love to extract the data. And certainly, we're going to talk to a lot of folks here on the technology, and also talk about the future products from Tableau. And more importantly, the Tableau community, as it's called by the CEO, is really a community. They have a very loyal base of customers who love the product. It's really liberating. We see companies like Tableau and Splunk on a slew of other startups out there making sense of the data, from the randomness and the looseness of the data, from the diversity of data, making sense of it's the number one thing. And I got to tell you, it's super exciting, but Tableau has competition. They win public, they're still losing money, they're investing, they have partnerships, there's a lot of international growth, we hit start on an announcement today. And obviously, mobile and cloud continue to drive the mega trend of this transformation. And companies who aren't having a data science practice or having native data into all their products will be at risk of being irrelevant. So we will be certainly documenting that and talking to the customers, but I want to hear what people are doing with data. People are betting their careers on platforms these days and there are not a lot of solid platforms because it's an emerging market. I want to get your take. As people make bets, Jeff, on their careers, they need to provide value. Investment has to turn into value. What's your take and what's your assessment of that? Well, certainly, we hear a lot about all types of knowledge worker, whatever kind of line of business you're in, whatever area of the business you happen to be in, you've got to be able to be more data savvy. I think that's clear. The question is, how do you actually, what does that translate to in practical terms? Does that mean sitting in front of an application where you're manipulating data all day? Or does that mean using data and the data points that are available to you, whether it's maybe not through an application such as a Tableau, that's actually integrated into your overall workflow? Is that a way to do it? So there's all different ways that data impacts the knowledge worker. Whether people are betting their career on this, I mean, certainly we've seen the explosion in the interest around data scientists as the big data theme has really emerged. There's a lot of skills that have to be kind of blended to be a solid data scientist. You've got to have the analytic skills, the visualization skills, but you also have to have the math skills and of course the business acumen. So there's a lot of opportunity for those types of people, but I think I wanted to go back for a second to the keynote today. So Christian Chabot, of course, is a pretty dynamic speaker. We learned that last year at this show. He gets the crowd pretty worked up and he's very, very focused and it seems Tableau as an organization is very, very focused on their customers. Being customer centric is another theme of kind of this modern economy and I think Tableau is clearly there. Christian talked a lot about in his keynote about enabling users to unleash their inner creativity. He kind of mentioned that this data visualization is not about kind of automating your routine tasks. It's about allowing users to be artists. He talked a lot about how creativity and unleashing ideas is really important for any kind of modern BI platform. However, he's never seen those words used in a modern or I should say in a business intelligence RFP. So he is trying to adapt. He and his company have really taken a new approach to BI and it seems like it's taking a little bit of time for the enterprise to kind of catch up and understand how to leverage these new tools. Now that said, companies growing like crazy as I mentioned, the most recent quarter, they announced they added 2,200 new customers. They're up to 1,500 employees. Revenue was way up, up 80% last quarter but they still they lost a little bit of money because of course they're investing heavily in both R&D. As Christian Chabot mentioned in the keynote, they're going to invest more in the next two years in R&D than they have in the last 10 years at Tableau. So they're investing a lot, they're spending a lot, they're growing a lot. So it's really interesting, going to be interesting to watch them as they adapt and see if they can keep their customer focus when they're growing at this break next week. You know, I agree with you. I think in looking at the keynote, some highlights to me that were fascinating. First of all, just to kind of disclaimer, I love Tableau. I'm a big fan of the company because two reasons. One is the founders built a business from scratch and bootstrapped it with customer, serving customers and then obviously they raised a huge round of financing on top of that and then obviously with that finance, they really needed it but it was for extra growth. So the founders built a viable business. They're company builders. They built a real business and then took on additional financing to give that rocket fuel that they needed to achieve the success they had. But the highlights to me in the keynote were very telling. You mentioned the creative minds unleashing the power of the creative mind. Again, a thread back to Apple, the Apple announcement today. The other comment was photography. This kind of reference to photography and how film costs money and then now when the cost goes to zero, when you have unlimited experimentation with photography, a whole nother revolution takes place and really the digital photography analogy really is viable because what that basically says is the cost of film went to zero, essentially. Then the unleashed creativity becomes paramount there. So that's the same exact trends you're seeing with data visualization. Essentially, data is the key asset in applications. And again, this is an ironic tie-in to the Apple event today because what Apple's doing is again, at a whole consumer level, leading this consumerization around data, apps, visualization, content presentation. The iWatch is a revolution. Not new, Samsung had one, but the iPhone 6, a bigger screen. Visualization is content just like photography. So I think Tableau's messaging and their vision is absolutely on the money. I think we are in the very early innings of this explosion of data visualization. And I'm just so excited. I think these guys are really well positioned. That being said, there's a ton of competition. Platform, all these other companies. Tell me, break that down for me. Well, there's absolutely a lot of competition. So there are, as I mentioned earlier, so when Tableau emerged, they really positioned themselves as a modern alternative to the more stodgy, the slow business intelligence, enterprise applications of the past. But, you know, Tableau's been around for a number of years now, and now there are new approaches to data visualization. Some based in kind of these new big data approaches, so you've got Hadoop specific visualizations, for instance. You've also got a lot of cloud players who are, and mobile players, mobile first business intelligence and analytic data visualization players that have come on the scene, that are putting pressure on Tableau from a, not necessarily from a competitive standpoint in terms of the revenue. Certainly Tableau is well beyond any of these smaller startups in terms of revenue and company size, and they've got stockholders, they're actually a public company. But just in terms of, they're putting a little bit of pressure on them to remain cutting edge in terms of their mobile capabilities and their cloud, their software, and service capabilities. So the good news is we did hear a little bit about that today in the keynotes. So we heard a little bit about something that's called Project Elastic, where Tableau is really creating a new mobile application. Dave Storey, who's going to be our first guest coming up in a moment, talked about really rewriting Tableau for the tablet, really making it intuitive, really focusing on people who are not power users, really just business users, even consumers potentially, to use this new application to analyze all that data that's in your iPhone from your Fitbit app or whatever healthcare app you might be using. So that's interesting. And in contrast to Apple, we talked about some similarities with Apple. The contrast to Apple is, while Apple gets a ton of covers, they are still a pretty, they've got about 15% of the mobile phone market. I heard their former CEO on CNBC this morning talking about how one of the sayings inside Apple was we sell to the people who love us. So Apple, despite all this coverage, is really not a huge consumer mass product like a Samsung, like the other smartphones out there. It is a fairly elite group that uses a lot of the Apple products. Come on, it's the number one selling smartphone. It's got 15% share. It's not exactly like it's got an overwhelming market dominant position in that sense. It's clearly the best integrated software hardware smartphone, but it's not the, I don't think you could argue that it's got the traction in terms of the larger market, worldwide market that some of the Google and Android phones have. They're just less expensive, the Android phones. So anyway, my point, and please take, let me hear your opposing view, but I think that the point is Tablo is trying to reach the entire audience. Is the most dominant iPhone on the market period. Android has more market share, but again, that's on pure volume. In terms of sales, in sales, iPhone dominates, and it's not 15%, it's 42% market share, so I wouldn't call that shabby. And so, certainly, Android has the quote share lead. But iPhone is definitely a dominant phone, it's not 15%, just to get the numbers straight on that. But the thing is, is that the iPhone and the iPad have 80% market share, 54% market share, the iPad has 80% market share, but this talks about the project elastic. This brings up some of the leadership things. So to come back to the Apple thing, what I would say about Tablo is, Steve Jobs and Apple, when he took it over years ago, now they're obviously one of the most performing companies in business history, it was about building great products. And to me, I see that we are in this modern era of rapid innovation, rapid life cycles of products, softwares eating the world, whatever you want to say, you are seeing product leadership being rewarded at great lengths. And so one of the things about Tablo has is that they have market leadership on the product side. So product leadership always will trump other gimmick-oriented products. I think the eye watch may be a little bit of a gimmick, but I'm going to definitely get one. So that's what I'm looking for, Jeff, is here, is to look at the product leadership capabilities of Tablo, what are they doing to advance the products, and two, what are the customer use cases for the successful next generation visualization? Visualization, as we've been covering Hadoop for now four years now, big data analytics, the killer app is visualization. So we want to dig into the hood. Well, I think the killer app is visualization, but it does need to be tailored to specific use cases, to specific users, whether that's a vertical focus, whether it's oil and gas industry, retail manufacturing, but even then digging even deeper into the specific role, whether you're a salesperson on the front line, whether you're in the manufacturing side of the business, and then from a, I think those are where some of the killer use cases come in, and which is interesting, this morning, we saw the announcement around some partnerships Tablo is established with some application providers that are vertically focused in healthcare, retail, and other places. So I think that's a good strategy from an OEM perspective for Tablo, because I think one of the challenges of a horizontal platform, a horizontal business intelligence platform, is that it gets you 80% of the way, but kind of getting that final 20% can be a challenge. So by aligning with some of these more vertically focused application providers, I think that's one way to kind of close that gap and kind of increase its usefulness even further. Jeff, we're going to have some fun with the Apple. You know I'm an Apple bigot. I live in Silicon Valley, I love Apple. You're more on the East Coast, so you don't have that loyalty like I have, but we're going to have some fun. I think comparing and contrasting to Apple will be fun. We can debate the different market shares, because I think, depending on how you look at the international market, say China, for instance, the fragmentation of the numbers, I don't believe. First of all, IDC reports weird numbers, so I'm not necessarily going to give them any credit on having accurate numbers, but if we look at total volumes, we will look at that. Either way, the verdict is clear. Smartphones are the preferred user interface. Data First is the strategy for companies, and visualizations will be the key. So we're going to be breaking it down here, inside theCUBE, here live in Seattle, Washington. We are here at the Tableau Data 14 conference. If you want to join us, you can tweet us at crowdchat.net slash data 14. Go to crowdchat.net, our new engagement container technology in public beta right now. You can just sign in. You don't need to get a beta request to comment. Go to crowdchat.net slash data 14. Join the conversation. I'm John Furrier with Wikibon analyst, Jeff Kelly, talking big data visualizations here in Seattle. We'll be right back after this short break.