Tableau 2019.2 SWOT

Daniel_Valente

Tableau 2019.2

August 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 

 

Company

• Founded in 2003, Tableau is based in Seattle, WA. In August 2019, Salesforce completed its acquisition of Tableau. Tableau will operate independently under the Tableau brand. There is some speculation about how cloud-based Salesforce and mostly on-premise Tableau will mesh.  
• 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 programproviding the software free to professors and students and discounting certification.
• Tableau has several hundred user groups (TUGs) by geography, industry, and topic.
• A Tableau user conference is now held in Europe in addition to the US.
• They have a Tableau Zen Mastersprogram, whereby people can nominate users for this status if they meet certain criteria for a one-year term.

 

Products

• Tableau Desktop runs on Windows and Mac. Other products include Tableau Server, Tableau Online (cloud), Tableau Public, Tableau Embedded Analytis, Tableau Developer Tools, and in 2018 they released Tableau Prep (server-based scheduling capabilities are in beta testing).  In 2018, Tableau introduced a new, cheaper Viewer role and uses named-user, subscription-based pricing.  Tableau acquired Empirical Systems in 2018 to strengthen analytics capabilities.
• Tableau is listed as a “Leader” in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics Platformsevaluation (seventh year in a row).

• Analysts like Gartner give Tableau high marks on ease of use, customer satisfaction, and solid growth. They get low marks on pricing, sales experience and contracting, as well as lack of complex data model support, and a decline in support. 

• For release 2019.2, highlights include

• Upgraded background mapping technology powered by MapBox, adding vector maps to make maps look sharper and allow the user to smoothly pan, zoom in, and zoom out to explore geospatial data, see more detailed location data, and perform analysis with more contextual background layers.
• Parameter actions provide more visual interactivity, allowing the user to change reference lines, calculations, queries, etc.
• Other enhancements include customizable tooltips in web authoring, a personalized Tableau Server homepage, improved dashboard building tools, and updates to AskData, Tableau’s English-only natural language capability, allowing users to ask questions like calculating averages, sorting, filtering and aggregating.

 

Target Audience

• From their mission: “It’s software for anyone and everyone.“ That said, the software appeals mostly to business users and IT with visualization its strength, though we also see analytical users using Tableau for presentation and sharing.

 

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 tough to position.  If they need to do more analysis, JMP will be easier to position and can even compliment sites that already have Tableau.
• Self-service visual discovery. JMP also can be positioned as self-service to both information producers and consumers with more interactive output viewable and sharable via browsers, Graph Builder on the iPad, and JMP Live.  Though JMP is a desktop product, with Query Builder, you can access data sources in databases and online, and with post-query scripts you can generate automatic analysis without seeing the data (open as invisible).  With add-ins, and now with JMP Live, you can share dashboards and queries with others to see the same analysis you do.
• Crisp visualization. JMP has come a long way with Graph Builder, interactive HTML output and other enhancements (e.g., see Xan’s Graph Builder gallery). Tableau may have more visual appeal, but JMP arguably has more ways to visualize data andperhaps more importantly analysis results, e.g., Profilers, design comparison, reliability growth, etc.  Many analytical visualizations are unique to JMP and powerful in the insights they enable.
• Server and cloud offering We now have JMP Live, we continue to position SAS as a server, and with appropriate licensing, JMP can be run on a Windows server. 
• Tableau continues to expand their support of big data technologies. They have many data connectors.  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 liston the Sales and Marketing Community. 

 

Feature Weaknesses and JMP Response

• Though Tableau has added some basic analytics, their strategy going forward is to rely on R, Python, and Matlab. They essentially have simple forecasts, box plots, tree maps, summaries, trend analyses, regressions, correlations, survey analysis, and clustering.  JMP has that and more with 30 years of analytical contributions to our software—powerful yet easy to use.  And JMP also integrates with R, Python, and Matlab as well as SAS.
• Tableau gets low marks for data manipulation, which is why they now offer Tableau Prep. JMP 15 has added more data manipulation enhancements and new data table features and doesn’t require purchasing an additional product to prepare data for discovery and analysis. In addition to all of the data prep capabilities in JMP, JMP continues to facilitate the analytic workflow, speeding the insights of what data manipulations may be necessary to reveal further insights.
• Though Tableau has calculation language (to calculate kurtosis, correlation, covariance, etc.), they don’t have the rich scripting language JMP has (though they do integrate with Python and have a Java scripting API). JSL lets you more easily bring multiple data types in, automate things, and extend the capabilities of JMP.  Tableau Prep has a component, Tableau Prep Builder, which will soon support custom Python and R script execution from within Tableau Prep flows, again, requiring an additional product and knowledge of R or Python.
• No Microsoft Office integration, though they now have the ability to export visualizations to PowerPoint and have had a free data reshaper add-in for Excel and an Excel and Text File connector for accessing data. JMP is integrated with Excel, has an import wizard on both Windows and Mac and we can export graphs and reports to Powerpoint.
• Price is high relative to value. Counter with JMP’s steep discount curve and areas of application and capabilities in one product.

 

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.
• Depending on which offerings from Tableau are being considered and for how many users, we may be able to offer more value.
• If Tableau is already entrenched, we may gain entry where more analytic power is needed.

 

Threats for JMP

• If Tableau is already in use and users need more advanced analytics, they may be asked to learn Python, Matlab and/or R.
• If Tableau is being considered, SAS Visual Analytics may be a sales opportunity as well, so careful qualification of needs is essential.

 

Pricing

• For individuals (includes Tableau Prep Builder and one Creator license of Tableau Server or Tableau Online) – $70 per user/month
• For teams and organizations
  • Tableau Creator (includes Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and one Creator license of Tableau Server) - $70 per user / month
  • Tableau Explorer (includes one Explorer license of Tableau Server) - $35 per user / month (minimum 5 Explorers required)
  • Tableau Viewer (includes one Viewer license of Tableau Server) - $12 per user / month (minimum 100 Viewers required)
  • Tableau Data Management add-on to Tableau Server - $5.50 user/month (minimum 100 users
    required for all Creators, Explorers, and Viewers on a Server deployment)

Competitive references where we’ve won against them or made entry despite Tableau already in place.

 

• Cardinal Health
• Cisco
• Apple
• Applied Materials
• GE Power