Big changes are coming to Tableau Software Inc.’s data visualization platform.

At its annual customer event in Austin today, the company laid out an ambitious three-year feature roadmap aimed at addressing the key trends that are shaping the work of business intelligence professionals. The first and arguably biggest item on the agenda is a new data engine based on the in-memory store that Tableau obtained through its acquisition of German startup HyPer back in March. The system provides the ability ingest and analyze records at the same time, which will enable users of the company’s analytics platform to perform stream processing much more easily than they can now.

An analyst working with sensory readings from their company’s infrastructure, for instance, may be able to take advantage of HyPer to visualize new transmissions as soon as they’re received. And Tableau is also planning to introduce artificial intelligence features alongside the engine to streamline dashboarding activities even further. The main highlight is a so-called “instant analytics” capability that will automatically display various contextual details as users interact with their data. In a demo at this morning’s conference, the software maker showed how its algorithms can recommend information sources and pick out visualization templates from its online library.

The planned features will presumably make their way both to main desktop version of Tableau’s platform and the increasingly popular cloud edition, which is also set to receive a separate update with a secure tunneling capability. The latter addition is designed mainly to ease the task of accessing and analyzing records from on-premise systems. It will be complemented by new data governance controls in Tableau Server, the visualization giant’s collaboration tool, that likewise aim to help organizations regulate the flow of information more effectively.

Topping off the roadmap is Project Maestro, an upcoming data preparation tool designed to speed up the time-consuming preliminary work involved in creating visualizations. Tableau says that the software will let analysts merge information from multiple sources, cleanse them and transform the combined whole into a workable form all through a graphical interface.

A delivery time frame wasn’t provided, but Project Maestro will probably hit the market sooner rather than later given that Tableau is already reaching out to interested customers.

Image via Tableau