Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante and Principal Analyst Jeff Kelly kicked off the sixth annual Tableau Customer Conference in Washington, D.C. with a thorough introduction to the company, its impact on the analytics landscape and the competition.

Vellante opens the discussion with a little background on Tableau, detailing that the firm’s sales grew more than 70 percent year-over-year to $200 million in the first quarter since becoming a public company. The IPO helped raise the company’s market capitalization to approximately $4 billion, an impressive feat considering its recent stock market debut.

Tableau offers a suite of data visualization products that enable business users and data scientists to rapidly integrate and analyze all kinds of information, from Excel spreadsheets to social media interactions and diagnostic infrastructure logs. The software eliminates the delays that plague traditional business intelligence projects.

“If you’re a business user [and] you wanted to analyze some data, you wanted to visualize it, you went to your IT department [and] you asked and begged for them to build you a dashboard or some type of application to allow you to analyze your data,” Kelly explains. “You got frustrated with that, you might load data into your Excel spreadsheet and try to work with it that way,” he says.” It’s been a difficult challenge for business users to make the most out of their data.”

The ease of use and speed of Tableau’s software has attracted big name customers such as GE, LinkedIn, Barclays and Cisco. The company boasts of expanding its user base by 1500 to over 13,500 in the last 18 months, dwarfing the growth rate of most other Big Data vendors.

Kelly highlights that the firm’s solution most direct competitor is Qliktech, which provides similar self-service visualization capabilities. But he stresses Tableau’s biggest rivals are the legacy vendors that continue to dominate enterprise IT.

Watch the video below for the full discussion.