In its first quarter as a public company, Tableau Software hit the ball out of the park, with revenues of $49 million, 71 percent year-over-year growth. It signed up more than 1,500 new customers, growing its customer base to 13,500 in more than 100 countries, and expects full year revenues of $198 million to 202 million, says CEO Christian Chabot.

Its secret, writes Wikibon Principal Research Contributor and Big Data Analyst Jeff Kelly, is its pioneering data visualization technology designed for business end-users to create and edit their own graphs on the fly rather than having to send requests to data experts and wait for results that are now always exactly what the user needs. It is so popular with users that SAP now offers Tableau to HANA users in competition with SAP’s own more traditional analysis system.

For end-users it is so compelling that much of Tableau’s growth comes from a “land and expand” strategy. It gains a foothold in an organization often on a single project with a small group of users and then waits for others in the company to see what it can do and demand it. In a few months everybody is using Tableau, which makes custom report creation much faster and takes a burden off often overwhelmed IT data managers.

Tableau is not perfect, Kelly says. Users working with Big Data usually either import a subset of the data into Tableau or connect through HIVE, which slows generation down. And Tableau has competition, both from newer startups and traditional vendors that are developing their own self-service interfaces. But Tableau has a big head start over the former and as a result has captured the market mindshare, while it is a fraction of the price of the latter. And it works with every flavor of database — traditional RDBMS, noSQL, newSQL, and of course Hadoop.

Kelly recommends that CIOs consider introducing their visualization end-users to Tableau or one of its start-up competitors to eliminate at least one of the multiple pressures overwhelming IT staff.

As with all Wiki on research, Jeff Kelly’s Professional Alert is available in its entirety on the public Wikibon Web site. its professionals are invited to join the Wikibon community, which allows them to comment on the published research and publish their own questions, tips, Professional Alerts and white papers on the site for the community to read. Members also receive invitations to the periodic Peer Incite Meetings, where CIOs discuss how they are using advanced technologies to solve real world problems.