Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcasted live from the 2013 Tableau Customer Conference in Washington DC, talking to the tech athletes and listening to their thoughts regarding current trends, metrics and new releases.

During his CUBE interview, Dan Jewett, Vice President of Product Management with Tableau, explained the company’s policy for the immediate future. Tableau is focusing on releasing a lot of capabilities, and keeping a certain rhythm. Their efforts are certainly appreciated by the public. Dave Vellante narrated that during the Keynote, every time Tableau announced a new feature, the audience would stand up and cheer. Having the applause meter through the roof was certainly a good testament of the effort the Tableau team was putting into making their customers’ lives better and easier.

New releases from Tableau

As they describe their product, “Tableau strives to make a difference in people’s lives,” providing them with a productivity improvement tool. They’ve recently announced Tableau for Mac.

“We’re trying to keep the cadence really high. We’re trying to get lots of releases and lots of opportunities to get new capabilities out to our customers. We’re working on 8.1 – targeted for Q4, 8.2 – the Macintosh feature, around 2014 in Q1. And we have another product in the mix called Tableau Online – a cloud-based analytics product.”

With so many releases and projects going on, Dave Vellante asked Jewett how he managed to focus and prioritize. The secret to doing the right thing is paying close attention to the customers.

“You look at what your customers are asking you to do and try to find out what things you can do to help them move forward,” Jewett said. “For us the storytelling aspect is a very important thing. The analytics does not happen in a silo. You’re always either selling some ideas you have from working with your data, or you’re telling stories and explanations around what happened with the data, so to be able to focus and highlight on that and extend those capabilities is really important for us. Storytelling is not always a verbal medium. A lot of times you read it. So you need the analytics to help the reader figure out what to do with that process.”

As Jeff Kelly noted, a lot of the business growth lies in Tableau’s ability to provide the Enterprise-grade features: security and scalability, among others. “That is obviously a very important thing for us, and we’ve had a pretty good traction,” Jewett agreed. “With this release we’ve added a couple of things around security and authentication, and the whole stack is now 64 bit end-to-end. We continue to put energy into all those big things in the infrastructure side, and we continue to expand in those deployments,” promised Jewett.