January 2019
“Who are JMP’s competitors? (maybe we have them in narrow areas) — but there is nothing else like it.
Who is as interactive?
Who else does as great a job at DOE?
Who does analysis faster and bigger on the desktop?
Who else does Graph Builder as well?
No one, because JMP is truly unique in the crowded marketplace.” -John Sall
Note: This is a first pass at SWOT for Tableau Server. We need to partner with the sales teams to provide feedback on this SWOT as conversations about JMP Live take place. Thanks in advance for the feedback.
Company
- Founded in 2003, Tableau is based in Seattle, WA with > 4000 employees, > 82,000 accounts, and > 300,000 users. Tableau’s IPO in 2013 was well received and in recent years, the stock price has been trending up.
- Tableau has over a thousand partners—Reseller, Technology, Alliance and OEM. These include Accenture, Deloitte, Teradata, IBM, Amazon Web Services, Google, and others.
- Tableau has an academic program providing the software free to professors and students.
- Tableau has > 200 user groups (TUGs) by geography, industry, and topic.
- Tableau’s user conference is attended by more than 17,000 customers and partners.
- They have an exclusive Tableau Zen Masters program, whereby people can nominate users for this status if they meet certain criteria for a one-year term.
Product
- Tableau Server 2018.2 was released in July 2018. It runs on Windows and Linux. Tableau is listed as a “Leader” in Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics Platforms evaluation (sixth year in a row). Other products include Tableau Desktop, Tableau Online (Cloud), and the new Tableau Prep. In June 2018, Tableau acquired Empirical Systems, a pioneering AI start-up originating at MIT. They plan to bring “sophisticated statistical analysis and automatic data insights” to the Tableau platform.
- Analysts like Gartner give Tableau high marks on flexible deployment, focus on user experience, and interactive exploration. They get low marks on pricing, complex packaging, lack of complex data model support, still-limited predictive analytics, and lack of data preparation capabilities, which often leads to dependency on other tools for the deployment to be successful, adding to the total cost of ownership/pricing issue. Tableau released a stand-alone data prep tool, Tableau Prep, in April 2018, which was mentioned as still in beta in the Gartner Magic Quadrant so was not part of the evaluation.
- For release 2018.2, highlights include the following:
- Tableau Extension Gallery—dashboard extensions built by partners in the new Extension Gallery (in beta as of this writing). Choose from many extensions - including natural language capabilities and the ability to see metadata for each field used in a visualization.
- Backgrounder job admin tools—GetJobList API provides a programmatic way to pull a list of completed, running, and pending jobs and CancelJob API provides the ability to reclaim resources from running and pending jobs.
- Dashboard Extensions—Interact with data from third-party applications directly in Tableau. Capabilities like write-back to a database, custom actions, and deep integration with other apps. As dashboard extensions are published to Tableau Server or Tableau Online, site admins can manage which extensions are allowed to run.
- Commenting improvements—Use @mention to direct your comment or question to a specific user. Your colleague will be notified via email.
- Tableau Services Manager—New Tableau Server admin experience for Windows and Linux in the browser. A streamlined user experience turns many admin tasks, including hot topology changes for backgrounder and VizQl Server processes into one-click updates.
Target Audience
- The audience for this product is primarily IT, however, the audience is also users wishing to collaborate and share on the web. The tag line for Tableau Server is “Analytics for everyone, everywhere.”
Feature Strength and JMP Response
- Ease of use. On the easy-to-use vs. functionality trade-off, we need to screen for what customers are really seeking. If they just want easy-to-use, pretty graphs with light analytics, JMP may be a tough sell. If they need to share more analysis results, JMP Live will be easier to position.
- Data exploration in a trusted environment. JMP Live can claim this, too.
- Ease of deployment. JMP Live offers as well.
- Connect to any data source. Publish and share data sources as live connections or extracts for everyone to use via Tableau’s web data connector and APIs to access various enterprise data sources. JMP may not have native access to specific databases, but we do access a wide variety of data in a flexible way (internet open, Excel, etc.). As long as the data source has an ODBC 3.0 compliant driver, we can get to the data. We don’t make as big of a deal listing out all of our data connectors, but we have started to compile a list on the Sales and Marketing Community.
- Centrally manage metadata and security rules. This is planned for JMP 15.
- Track and manage content, users, licenses, and performance. Manage permissions for data sources and content and monitor usage visually. Scale up as needed. JMP Live lets you do some of this, and you have the ability as an admin through the API to bring in data on usage and performance, analyze it in JMP and publish admin-like dashboards.
- Overall Tableau Server gets favorable user ratings: https://www.g2crowd.com/products/tableau-server/reviews and https://www.trustradius.com/products/tableau-server/reviews. From one of the comments, they are providing updates every few months.
Feature Weaknesses and JMP Response
- Though Tableau continues to add more analytics, they are still lacking, so the analytical richness of results that can be published to Tableau Server will also be very limited compared to JMP. JMP’s Profilers, Generalized Regression solution path visual, etc. are differentiators for those seeking to share more analytic results and/or collaborate with others on analytical projects.
- Tableau’s data prep capabilities (needed before posting results to Tableau Server) have been enhanced by the release of Tableau Prep, however, they are still lacking compared to the easy-to-use data prep capabilities in JMP software, streamlining the time to post results to JMP Live.
- Tableau Tech Support is apparently only via email—no phone number to call for any urgent issues. JMP has 24/7 award-winning Tech Support with an excellent time-to-resolution metric.
- A few negative comments about the price for enterprise deployment.
Opportunities for JMP
- Data Visualization is increasingly considered a single component of a broader set of data discovery and analysis capabilities. This is why we often see JMP customers who use JMP along with Tableau and even view them as complimentary. Given JMP’s 30 years’ worth of enhancements, we have a lot to offer for visual discovery and analysis. The need to share analysis results and to collaborate on analysis may be well served by using JMP Live.
- If Tableau is already entrenched, we may gain entry where more analytic power is needed.
Threats for JMP
- The more analytics Tableau adds, the harder it will become to differentiate our products. If Tableau is being considered, SAS Visual Analytics may be a sales opportunity as well, so careful qualification of needs is essential.
Pricing
- Tableau Viewer lets you view and interact with dashboards and visualizations in a secure platform and includes one Viewer license of Tableau Server – $12 per user/month.
- Tableau Explorer lets you explore data and answer your own questions with full service analytics and includes one Explorer license of Tableau Server – $35 per user/month.
- Tableau Creator lets you discover insights with a suite of products for end-to-end analytics workflow and includes Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, and one license of Tableau Server – $70 per user/month.
- According to Gartner, Tableau Server is available as "bring your own license" on the Azure and AWS marketplaces; it is also available in pay-by-the-hour on AWS Marketplace.
Competitive references where we’ve won against them or made entry despite Tableau already in place.
