Recently named as one of the top workplaces in its home state of Washington, it turns out that Tableau Software is capable of a whole lot more than just creating a thriving company culture.

SiliconANGLE has previously reported on how Tableau has gained a lot of traction in the business intelligence segment over the last 12 months. Now, with the merits of its data visualization platform set to be showcased at next week’s Strata Hadoop World Conference, Tableau has just been ranked by research firm Gartner as one of the best programs of its kind for both ease of use and ease of development.

The findings, revealed in Gartner’s new report: Survey Analysis: Customers Rate Their BI Platform Implementation Costs, also rated Tableau highly for its low startup costs and its overall quality, backing up the company’s claims that it offers one of the best platforms for businesses to manage and exploit their big data.

Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau Software, said that Gartner’s findings underlined what a tremendous impact its software was having in the field of data visualization:

“We are ushering business analytics out of the dark ages and into its golden era of fast, easy, self-service analytics for everyone. We believe our performance in these categories proves that the impact for our customers is tremendous.”

Tableau Software is a desktop-based data visualization tool that has already been adopted by dozens of large companies and media organizations, with its primary use being to create sophisticated visual representations of big data that even your grandmother could understand.

Don’t believe me? Well, one of its biggest clients happens to be The Seattle Times newspaper, which uses Tableau software to enhance its digital storytelling. Meanwhile, it has also been touted by STR Analytics for the valuable insights it can provide to the hotelier industry, among others.

More recently, Tableau also played a part in the Human Face of Big Data project created by Rick Smolan, helping the team dissect the mass of big data it accumulated from its mobile application and visualize this in a series of ‘mission control’ events in Singapore, New York and London that shed light on what big data means to humanity at large.

Just like Google opened up the web to the world, Tableau aims to make data analysis a task that anyone can perform, and it’s doing a grand job of it so far. The software is notably distinct from competitor programs in that it’s capable of taking the raw data from any organization – no matter what industry or business that organization might be involved in, before automatically identifying the best way to visualize that dataset.

The result is that Tableau users don’t even have to think about how they might want to conceive the data themselves – something that most of them probably couldn’t do if they pondered on it for several years – the software does it all for them, meaning that finally, everyone has a way to put their big data to use.