Tableau: Business Intelligence for the Masses

Company:

Headquarters: Seattle

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Tableau Server/Desktop

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: 80 worldwide, 50 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Tableau brings high-end functionality downstream, helping companies make sense of business intelligence data by presenting it graphically.

The Lowdown: Business intelligence software has a great deal of promise, but cost and complexity have kept it out of the reach of many firms. As a result, many companies are forced to slog through spreadsheets to analyze data that resides in various back-end systems like CRM, accounting and inventory management.

But a scrappy Seattle-based firm called Tableau Software is making inroads into the business intelligence space -- where the likes of Microsoft, Business Objects, and Cognos have ruled supreme -- with a technology that presents tabular data in graphical format.

Not only does this approach bring complex data within reach of anyone within an organization, it also helps companies keep tabs on the mountains of business intelligence data they're generating, says Kevin Brown, vice president of alliances and partnerships at Tableau Software

"Data is exploding largely due to the Web's expansion, and companies need help collecting, storing and cleaning it," said Brown.

Tableau sells to companies of all sizes, but sees huge opportunity in bringing business intelligence down to small and medium companies, and that's where the channel comes in. "Smaller companies need VARs to help harness the potential of BI, and that adds up to training services, data preparation, and purchasing and implementation guidance," Brown said.

One of these VARs is Omega Legal, a Phoenix-based solution provider focused on financial and practice management systems for law firms, which developed a BI system based on Tableau's Desktop edition called Visual Xpress.

Visual Xpress cuts the time needed to generate reports in half, and Omega Legal's clients are already realizing these time savings, said Jim Wooldridge, marketing manager at Omega Legal Systems, noting that Tableau has a channel-savvy approach and steers its partners toward the most economical solutions.