Last week, Tableau Customer Conference 2013 ended at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Washington, D.C. with 3200+ attendees from 40+ countries and 100+ industries. The conference was packed with a lineup of great sessions offered by Tableau customers, developers, product experts, and industry thought-leaders.

For the past six years, data enthusiasts from all over the globe have come together for the Tableau Customer Conference to discover how to leverage their investment in data analytics, hear about what’s next in business intelligence, and network with other like-minded individuals.  Here’s a quick glance of what were the development from developer point of view:

Tableau 8.1 announced

Tableau introduced the next version of business intelligence tool Tableau 8.1. This release provides a number of new capabilities to data visualization with increased source options providing more flexibility, performance, and functionality. The new version is built on 64 bit architecture and supports Integration with R, SAML (single-sign-ON on Server and Desktop), IPV6 and External Load Balancers, Copy/Paste Dashboards and worksheets between workbooks, new Calendar Control, own visual style, including customizing even filters, Tukey’s Box-and-Whisker Box-plot, prediction bands, and ranking.

The R integration is particularly impressive. Advances in the R language through the R community have been robust and continue to gain steam and recently in a report the language tops the charts as most preferred language for data science and big data analytics. Tableau developers will still need to know the details of R, but now output can be natively visualized in Tableau. Depending on their needs, developer can gain a more integrated and advanced statistical experience with integration with R.

In addition, the company will soon announced version 8.2 and Tableau 8.2 on MAC including feature like StoryPoint. StoryPoint allows users to create a storyboard of visualizations for easy presentation to show how analysis leads from an initial situation to important and sometimes unexpected conclusions.

Dynamic visualization of data

Software development project management is a cumbersome process for people, projects, and costs. Tableau helps software developers to understand where teams are spending time and balance workloads, dynamic representation of data, quickly pinpoint problems that affect release dates or quality assurance, aggregate and analyze feedback from user testing, and communicate status to stakeholders in real-time interactive dashboards.

Jim Wahl, Sr. Director, Product Management at Aware and Ryan Sleeper, Manager, Data Visualization & Analysis at Evolytics, shared Tableau’s impact on data visualization at theCUBE.

Wahl and Sleeper explained that Tableau helps you find dynamic visualization of data. His visualization project involved data on volunteerism in America, following trends in different states, based on age groups, ethnicity, economical factors, or other criteria. With Tableau, you’re able to take visualization, automation, and interaction one step further.

Sarah Nell, Global Corporate Account Analyst with Manpower, explained that for staffing and HR driven firm like Manpower, analytics is important as it translates IT capabilities into the business needs. She demonstrated how the Tableau Online analytical dashboard is a natural fit for her needs as it presents data in an elegant, clean and simple way.

Steve Keller, Staff Software Engineer with Citrix, said that one of the trends of the moment seems to be the simplification of software and Tableau is heading into that direction to a large extent. He said Citrix’s next direction is to not only the simplicity of laying out the visualization of dragging and dropping of data elements, but the simplicity of the variety of data, ingesting social data and extracting most out of it. This is exactly where Tableau is sitting right now to unlock the power of data for the average business.

Seamless access to data

Zynga is known for leading provider of social games like FarmVille, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars on social networks and mobile devices. To support 235 million active users on daily basis, Zynga captures 3 Terabytes of data daily. The massive volume of game data captured every day can be used to improve the game experience through business intelligence solution that will enable any developers to quickly analyze and understand how user and game data can be leveraged to help create the most compelling social games.

To get a rapid-fire business intelligence, Zynga selected Tableau to enable data visualization and real-time interactive data analysis. It’s powerful, highly interactive, easy to integrate features is easily integrate into Zynga’s existing infrastructure and makes it much easier to identify actionable insights and share them throughout the company. With Tableau, Zynga can unearth vast amounts of user data in real-time, which will enable them to quickly make product decisions focused on creating the best social gaming experience.

Enterprise implementations are the battleground on which Tableau wants to compete and is making inroads through rapid adoption by the analysts who are responsible for analytics across the organization.