Covering the Tableau Customer Conference 2013, The CUBE hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly had an opportunity to chat with Coy Gupta, Global Search Architect of Paychex, about how the company is using Tableau to aggregate the company’s web data and internal data.

Paychex deals with a large amount of data, and that data continues to grow as the company moves into new markets like Germany and Brazil. With Tableau they are able to connect to Google Analytics and generate dashboards displaying their web performance and advertising performance and deliver reports to management that they can drill down through and glean from it the information they need with a few clicks, rather than the mess of Excel spreadsheets they would otherwise have.

Paychex develops their own marketing content through their ad team and marketing team. They produce their own videos and perform their own research all in-house. Before Tableau, they dealt with a lot of Excel spreadsheets with bright yellow and bright red markings all over them. Charting, Gupta said, was a “dark art”.

Now that the company uses Tableau, they are able to segment data into strategic layers that the normal user can click down into in order to unveil the various levels of complexity. On the customer end, they can also build sales demos for customers and empower users to empower themselves. When customers ask for something, they can deliver the licensing for it in a rather seamless fashion.

When asked about using Tableau in the cloud, Gupta had some reservations. He said that much of the financial data is safer on-premise, but the web data from sources like Google Analytics is already in the cloud, making it logical to use in those situations. Furthermore, for a company just getting started, he explained, it is an easier route because everything is setup and ready to launch.

Finally, looking to the future, Paychex is also hoping to expand its Tableau functionality to mobile devices over the next 6 to 12 months. Their dashboards will be available on tablet devices, and they hope this will help drive adoption and consumption. Adding visualizations is a key piece for the future, and Gupta said he is always looking forward to the next visualization.

For more coverage of #tcc13 as well as more interviews like this, visit SiliconAngle.tv.