 Everybody, this is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and I'm here with Jeff Kelly also of Wikibon. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's coverage of the Tableau Customer Conference. We're here in D.C., we're at the Gaylord Hotel, just an awesome setting as you can see behind us. We're looking at the Potomac and this is Tableau's Customer Conference, the big customer event. Tableau, for those of you who don't know, is an extremely hot, smoking hot visualization company. They just recently did an IPO. They've got a $4 billion market cap. We're talking about a $200 million company growing north of 70% annually. This company, Jeff, has really been on our radar since several years ago when our friend Abhi Meda introduced us to them at the Hadoop World Conference and it's all about capturing the power of big data and data through visualization. So it's not exclusively confined to Hadoop, but essentially there are organizations out there that are using spreadsheets or they're using traditional BI tools and either they're drowning in data and the Excel is just too cumbersome to use or they've got to go to the IT department through the traditional BI channels and basically ask, beg, borrow and steal the ability to get access to data and to reports. What Tableau does is they simplify that. They really, their mission was to put the data in the hands of the users through visualization. Visualization as we've talked about SiliconANGLE Wikibon is a critical component of big data and Jeff, we're here wall to wall to cover this. It's good to be working with you again. It's good to be working with you too, Dave. Yeah, so give me your take on visualization and its importance to the whole data and big data industry. Sure, well, for years, really data was not readily available in terms of easily analyzing it to business users. You had to typically go through, if you're a business user, you wanted to analyze some data, you wanted to visualize it. You went to your IT department, you asked, beg, as you said, sometimes for them to build you a dashboard, some type of application to allow you to analyze that data. If you got a little frustrated with that, you might load data into your Excel spreadsheet and try to work with it that way. But really, it's been a difficult challenge for business users to make the most of their data and that's what Tableau's all about, to try to make it easier for business users, not data scientists necessarily, although data scientists also love some of the capabilities of Tableau's suite of software. But for business users, really, to very easily pull together their own visualizations to help them do their jobs on a day in, day out basis. And ultimately, we talk about, in the big data space, we talk a lot about some of the underlying infrastructure and the database world, things like Hadoop and NoSQL databases being able to scale to really, now we can store and process so much more data in any number of structures. But ultimately, to get the value from that data, you've got to unlock it and make it available to business people who are actually making the decisions on the ground every day. So that's really where Tableau comes in. Making it possible for business users to really get a better understanding of their data, find insights that they otherwise couldn't find and just really unlocking the power of data. So today, Jeff, is really customer day. We have got some guests from Tableau on, but major, major customer day. We've got GE coming on. They're coming on at the top of the hour, 10 o'clock Eastern time. LinkedIn will be on. Paychecks, Barclays Bank, Apple computers coming on. Excited to hear from those guys. Manpower. Manpower's a story that Tableau loves to share because of the impact that it had on the time it took to actually get to data and the resources that it took to get to data. Cisco's coming on. Ray Wang is here. He's at the conference. We just saw him on Twitter. He's going to come on and give his perspectives. So really looking forward to that. And then tomorrow, Jeff, we've got more customers, but also more content from the Tableau executives, right? That's right. We're going to have Kristen Chebo's going to come on. The CEO, of course, rang the bell at the NASDAQ in May when the company went public. As you mentioned, Dave, they're having a fantastic run of it lately. Last quarter, around $50 million in revenue, up 71% year over year. Signed 1,500 new customers. They're up to 13,500 customers. So we'll talk to Kristen about kind of the momentum the company's seeing. We'll also talk to Alisa Fink will join us, the CMO, who's really running this conference, doing a great job. Had some time last night to visit with customers and attendees. Everyone really excited about the conference. So we'll talk to Alisa about that as well. And then of course we'll have even more customers and some partners as well. So as you said, I mean, recent IPO, and this thing is really smoking hot. I mean, talking about a $200 million company with a $4 billion market cap. So I mean, it's up there from an IPO standpoint with the likes of a work day or a service now. Smaller from a market cap perspective than those companies, but it's right out of the chute. I mean, they basically had one quarter of a million people unpacking some of that. Jeff, talk a little bit about the competition and then we'll cut to our next guess. But who does Tableau compete with in this space? Well, a couple different areas. So kind of in the same or similar vein, I should say of Tableau, there's a company called ClickTech. Tableau and Click often get compared because they take a somewhat similar approach in terms of providing self-service data visualization capabilities aimed at business users. But really even more than Click, I think what they're really competing against, Dave, are the incumbent business intelligence players, SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos and others who really have a very strong foothold in the enterprise, but they take a much different approach. It's much more IT-led business intelligence that is the kind of the scenario we're talking about earlier, where an end user or a department might request certain types of applications and dashboards. They go to IT, make the request. IT builds them using- A cube? Yeah, build the cube. No pun intended. We're here at the cube. We love cubes, but you don't really necessarily love to get them through IT. Massaging the data, knowing the question ahead of time that you want to answer, the questions you're looking to monitor, putting that together, delivering maybe, you know, dashboard weeks later, maybe months later, only to find out if you're the end user. Well, this isn't exactly what I wanted and now you've got to go back to them. There's a traditional BI vector and then there's also the Excel users, right? That's what end users use. Well, what happens, yeah, what happens a lot is that the scenario I just described will obviously frustrate end users so they'll start doing things on their own in Excel. Basically, you'll end up with Excel spreadsheets all over the place. And, you know, Excel, for all its, you know, it is a powerful tool and Microsoft is investing more money in things like PowerPivot to make it easier and being able to scale and actually visualize the data a little bit differently. It's still not the easiest tool to use and that's where, you know, Tableau really tries to fill that void, making it easy, even if you're using Excel, to put Tableau on top of that and really create some dynamic visualization. So you touched on it, but I want to follow up and get a little more color on this. So what in your view makes Tableau unique and different? Right, well, I think a couple of things. The ease, I constantly hear from customers is the ease of use. You know, I had one customer say to me last night, look, it's business intelligence data, so it's not necessarily easy, but Tableau is certainly the leader in terms of ease of use. If you're an end user, if you want to build your own visualizations. Basically, they take a very simple drag and drop GUI interface approach. You can drag data sources together. You can visualize them in any number of ways. You can ask a question, get a visualization. Maybe it's not what you expected. Quickly change that visualization to something else. So you can explore the data much more interactively than you can in a lot of other, using other tools like the traditional business intelligence applications. All right, so we're here all day today and tomorrow. Wall-to-wall coverage, this is theCUBE. We hope to have Nate Silver on tomorrow. You know theCUBE, our tagline since 2010 is we extract the signal from the noise, so we're going to ask Nate if he stole that line from us for his book, who knows. So today, big customer day. Philip Kim is coming up next from GE. We're going to talk to him about what GE is doing with data, what he's doing with data, what the Tableau factor is there. So keep it right here. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back. Oh, I should mention, definitely tweet us. I'm Matt DeValante. He's at Jeffrey F. Kelly, pound theCUBE and pound TCC 13 is the hashtag for this conference. Right, and don't forget, we'll be streaming the CEO, Christian Chabot's keynote, 1.15 this afternoon. So tune in to SiliconANGLE. Christian Chabot was the founder and visionary. So keep it right there. We'll be right back after this brief word.