 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, welcome back everyone. This is day two of Tableau Conference, day to 14. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Jeff Kelly from Wikibon. This is Jeff day two of two days of live coverage live in Seattle. Day one was smashing success. Tableau people injecting Kool-Aid in their veins. Everyone's smiling. But last night, we pretty much, we pretty much wrapped up everything yesterday, but let's talk about like last night's party. So what'd you think? Space Needle was cool. George Matthews Alterichs had this VIP reception at the top. Yeah. But they wouldn't let you bring drinks out into the space Needle. That was a little strange. They had, you had to leave your drinks before you entered that part of the area and then you can get another drink once you're there. I'm not sure what that was about, but nevertheless, the party was pretty good. It was, it's a big area there. It's the Space Needle, but I didn't realize there's grounds that surround the Space Needle. You've got the EMP Museum, kind of homage to Seattle's rock scene, it's kind of cool. They had throwback pictures from like the 60s. It was built in 1962 and they've had over 54 million visitors since. And they were showing some old photos and one of the signs from the 60s was get high with me. It was like a big billboard and it was in this kind of 60s. There was some Jimi Hendrix kind of billboards, but Seattle, great city. I mean, it's nice here. I mean, I like Seattle and I thought the party was fantastic. I mean, it was huge. It was a very big party. About 5,500 attendees at the show, I think pretty much every single one of them was at the party. Going up to the Space Needle was kind of cool. We got to spend some time with some of the Tableau executives, a lot of customers, a lot of users, which is really always fun. And of course, some partners as well. Alterics had a nice party there in the Space Needle, so yeah, it was a good time. So tell me, what conversations did you have yesterday that you could share? I mean, I had a bunch of different conversations that stood out last night, because that's when people start having a few cocktails. That's when the real stories come out. What did you learn, Jeff, last night? You bumped into some people. You don't have to name names, but what did you discover last night? Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that I've noticed at the show is that there's actually, we talked a lot about the partnership yesterday and we're going to have a number of Tableau partners on today, but there's also, you know, one kind of, there's essentially an ecosystem building up around Tableau, professional services and consultants to actually extend the capabilities of the Tableau software, so which is interesting because Tableau is positioned as a self-service, very easy to use data visualization tool, something that business users can use on their own without having to go to IT without needing specialized training, which is largely true, but there are certainly some capabilities that Tableau brings to the table that really aren't for that average user. So there's actually an ecosystem of consultants building up a company called Intraworks I spoke with last night, and they essentially are a consultancy that help Tableau customers get the most out of their investment in Tableau, so that was kind of an interesting area that I don't think it's a lot of coverage around Tableau because of their value proposition, which is self-service. I'm very impressed with George Matthew at Altarix because one of the things we talked about last night I bumped into at the party was, he's a big car buff and you know, he was bringing up the analogy with his engine, we talked to the carburetor, it was kind of like a kind of prod, and he's not a carburetor, he says he's a pistons, but his company is actually doing some very compelling things Altarix, amazing, amazing attraction, and he called it right, George Matthew really, you know, three years ago when we interviewed first on theCUBE, he basically laid out what he thought the market would do and he made the bet on Tableau. The other thing that I learned in talking to some folks, I won't name names, but basically the sentiment that I overheard last night was, it's Tableaus to lose at this point and if they don't screw it up, they'll do well. And then some of the other conversations was from some folks is they weren't really sure if Tableau truly understands their market position. Some think that they just are there and they don't understand the monopoly opportunity that they could build out. So we had an interesting conversation one senior executive from not Tableau said, hey, Tableau is sitting in a sweet spot right now in the market and he's not sure that they truly understand the potential that they could do in the operating system. And I found that interesting because I think Tableau leads on that they don't really know, but I think that they do. I think they do too. On the one hand, they talk about still being disruptors and they are relatively small compared to the companies they're disrupting like SAP and Oracle. But at the same time, they talk about having a TAM of essentially every company on the planet. So they, I think they recognize it. I think they're being a little coy. I think they're smart to try to keep that disruptor feeling, try to keep that startup feeling. Why would you advertise the fact that you have a competitive advantage opportunity? I think I would just keep my nose to the grindstone and just keep plugging away and act the, hey, don't mind us. We're just this little visualization company over here. Don't mind us, you know, SAP business objects. We're just eating your lunch. Yeah, yeah, take a few croissants. Now we're moving on to lunch and you move on to dinner. So I think Tableau's in a good position, but overall last night I thought the overall vibe, Jeff, was really special. After the Space Needle party, I then followed some Tableau, Dave Martin. You can see in your executive at Tableau and I and George Matthew from AlterX. We went to the Tableau kind of like after hour bar and Christian Chabot was there. They're karaoke. The culture is very amazing. I mean, in the sense that the culture is, and I've talked about this for many, many years on my blog and also here in theCUBE, companies that where the founders stay around really, really succeed. And that is something that you look at, you know, startups and VCs, how they swap out the CEOs, fire the CEOs and founders. End of the day, companies that have founder led businesses tend to do much better than not. So for all you founders out there, don't let anyone tell you to leave the company. The challenge of course is it's a different skill set from being kind of that visionary for the idea for a product or a company. And then when you have to scale the company and actually run the operations and when you're public and you've got all those responsibilities, it's a different skill set. If you can find a founder who has both skill sets, you know, that's a rare find. Christian Chabot I think has that rare combination. Well, I think he knows when to step away. I mean, to me, as a founder or entrepreneur myself, one thing that I've learned is you got to know what you don't know. And one of those things is that you hand the operational stuff over to someone else. If you're not an operating guy, if you're an operating guy, you bring someone with a vision. So to me, I think Tableau has a nice chemistry there. And again, people have been with this company and they're not leaving. I mean, that's the telltale sign. Huge growth, great recruiting, and people don't leave. It's not four years and done, you know? People don't leave and their customers end up coming to work for them because they're so excited about the product and the company. I think we saw this last year. The show's grown last year about 3,200 people. This year, 5,500. The vibe is similar though. Very excited customer base. Cheering during the keynotes when new features are announced. Very much kind of was a party atmosphere. It was a party last night. It was a party atmosphere. So a really positive vibe happening here. The ecosystem, Jeff, talk about the ecosystem. What's your take on the ecosystem? Because they are planting the seeds all around. I think, well, what I mentioned earlier, it's interesting that this ecosystem is building up kind of on top of Tableau to extend the capabilities of Tableau to help Tableau customers get the most out of their investment in Tableau software. And again, that's a little bit counter to the Tableau messaging that we are fully self-service and a fully, full feature business intelligence, data visualization application for the average user. So that's interesting. The other thing, of course, is they're extending their partnerships with kind of below the stack the database layer, the data engine, if you will, including cloud players. We're going to have Google on today, AWS on today as well. So it'll be interesting to see how the cloud angle is playing out for Tableau. I think they were a little late to the cloud game. They're competing with some cloud first business intelligence companies that are kind of trying to put some pressure on Tableau, trying to position Tableau now. It's almost past a kind of second generation where you've got these new third generation BI tools that are built for the cloud, built for mobile. So that's interesting. I think the challenge, as we talked about yesterday for Tableau, is to maintain their customer focus as they scale. And one of the ways, one of the things they're going to have to do, and I think Tableau acknowledged this, is they're going to have to hand off a little bit of that customer interaction to partners, to OEM partners, to SIs and others. So it's really important for them to integrate tightly with those partners so those partners can kind of continue to give Tableau customers the attention that they expect from Tableau but now coming through the partner ecosystem. So we have a lot of great stuff going on today. Keynote, we've got Michael Lewis here keynoting. We're going to try to give him a little money ball. Jeff, we'll try to see if we can squeeze him in. We'll give him a shot. We'll see if we can squeeze him into our busy schedule. He's got huge commitments. We're going to try to rope him in. He's not confirmed at this point. We've got LinkedIn. We've got a really cool guest from the Texas Rangers. Great, another sports team. We know we love sports with the ESPN of tech. That's what we do. And we're going to go to get a little sports action. Yep, we've got Wells Fargo be coming on today. Just overall good group of people. The Tableau community is really smiling. People got a spring to their step, very young, very energetic. And the theme is, is that people are betting their careers on Tableau. And I think that to me is a great thing. And it's a huge new thing. And people we heard from people yesterday come by the cue like, I'm betting my career on this new modern BI, business intelligence model, not the old way. And Tableau is leading the charge. Yeah, well it's interesting because you've got, I think about how people bet their careers if you're a DBA, being an Oracle DBA. And now you've got, in the BI space, you've got practitioners who are betting their careers on being kind of a Tableau expert. So that tells me clearly these users, these customers have a lot of faith in Tableau and that they're going to be around for the long haul and that they're going to continue that customer focus. All right, so we day two is kicking off here. We're going to go wall to wall again all day. We'll wrap up around 5.30, stay here in the queue. We're going to be broadcasting live from Seattle, Tableau, day to 14's conference. Be right back with our first guest after this short break.