From the 2013 Tableau Customer Conference in Washington DC, theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante, Wikibon Senior Analyst, and Jeff Kelly, Principal Research Contributor, managed to talk in depth with Steve Keller, Staff Software Engineer with Citrix.

As expected, the segment revolved around Big Data and Tableau, as the goal of Tableau is “unlocking the power of data for the average business,” including the customers who are not data scientists.

Naturally, Vellante pressed for the “aha” moments, inquiring what surprised Keller the most when he started using Tableau. There were two major things that appealed to Steven Keller:

1. the simplicity

“Not only the simplicity of laying out the visualization of dragging and dropping of data elements, but the simplicity of the variety of data,” Keller stated.

2. the value behind utilizing a given graphic or a given chart as a filter for the others

“That’s been the biggest surprise of how valuable is the ability to utilize that to answer your questions interactively,” said Keller.

How to make data ingestion easier for developers?

So, as a developer, “what are the key things that would make your job even easier?” asked Jeff Kelly. Steve Keller explained it was hard to pinpoint a to-do list when still using a new product, but he declared himself impressed with the overall job the Tableau team did so far. He was extremely pleased with the “instructional videos” available, deeming them “invaluable.”

That is how Keller started up using the product: using the community and the tutorials. “I heard about Tableau, I searched it, downloaded the trial and started playing around and, being a developer, I wanted to see what I could get out, and then I started looking at training videos. I’ve used them a lot and I recommend keeping that feature up.”

Simplicity is key for Citrix’s partners + pipeline

One of the trends of the moment seems to be the simplification of software. “What we see now is software evolving to the point where no training will be necessary,” predicted Vellante. “It sounds like Tableau is heading into that direction, to a large extent.” Keller agreed: “It depends on the industry. Different industries have different focus. Some things take an amount of complexity, some real thought and some innovative design – if you will – to make something simple that’s complex in nature. I think, as a whole, we are definitely getting simpler, because we have so much more technology that helps us with that but I don’t think we’re there yet.”

TheCUBE co-hosts wanted to know next what was exciting for Keller, from the development standpoint. Steve Keller nominated 2 key things:

1. apps – stating that mobile is the key focus now
2. data – exactly where Tableau is sitting right now

“We have these mobile devices in our hands everyday and we need to tie that with what’s going on on the social networks,” Keller explained. “We need link those things together and realize the value that we can get by looking at those feeds correlating that with what’s going on in our sales and also in our support. We’re starting to realize there’s value in ingesting social data and we’re trying to understand what we can do with that.”