Broadcasting live from the 2013 Tableau Customer Conference in Washington DC, theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante, Wikibon Senior Analyst, and Jeff Kelly, Principal Research Contributor, spoke with one of our favorite guests Ray Wang, Co-Founder and Researcher with Constellation Research, about Business Intelligence and various trends bubbling up in this industry, including the perks of Tableau compared to other market players, and how Tableau can succeed through sales or an acquisition.

Dave Vellante kicked off the interview by asking Wang about his take on “the schism of traditional BI and what Tableau is producing.” Ray Wang thinks this is the case where people build things from bottom up and top down. “Traditional BI is getting the data right, structured, looking good. And by the time they get to the fun part, the technology changes and they start all over again. Tableau, and other visualization tools, are going in, grabbing the data, prompting you to ask the questions and find the patterns.”

Two verbs that perfectly describe the workflow of Tableau are “relate” and “chase.”.No one wants to sit around and wait for the Big Data warehouse to be built. Nowadays there are systems of record versus systems of engagement, where engagement is through visualization, and that’s what Tableau brings.

BI business trends

As for the business trends, Wang highlighted two business models: West Coast and East Coast. The West Coast philosophy seems to be spend a lot of money, get a lot of customers on board, get the product out, win the go-to-market battle, while the East Coast business strategy is simpler: get profitable.

Constellation recently brought in a new CEO, who will be responsible with building a new user business and a gross strategy. They are also preparing an event, scheduled from October 30 to Nov 1st, the Constellation Connected Enterprises, Third Annual Innovation Summit, designed for the executives. As Wang put it, “it’s all things digital for the enterprise.”

Ray Wang’s company is launching Constellation Index, giving a sneak peak into the mobile ROI (341 data points) at the AirWatch Conference. He has a lot of admiration for the Workday team, who managed to get 31 deals in the last 12 months, getting 28 of them to work. This just goes to show that the market is very active. Also, “the usability comes back into play. Everyone wants something that their customers are excited to use,” said Wang. The main thing about the Tableau users is the user experience. “Workday seems to get it right at the core HR, and also some of the HR development capabilities that you would associate with the success factor,” added Vellante.

Tableau vs. others

Next up, Jeff Kelly brought the discussion back to “Tableau vs others incoming BI players.” The main focus of the company is now “land and expand,” said Wang. “It’s a UX war and they are democratizing that information. Other companies are realizing now the importance of visual analytics. But to get this to the executive level will require a different type of selling.” As for a potential acquisition, Ray Wang sees a match between Adobe and Tableau as ” a match made in Heaven.”