Tableau Software LLC, a Salesforce.com Inc. company, is adding new capabilities to its platform today to help companies better scale up their data analytics operations.

The company is framing Tableau 2021.3 as a major new release that’s meant to help organizations better manage the “data chaos” that exists today and ensure superior governance of data as they expand their operations. There are a number of new features meant to ensure analytics can scale with enterprise demand, Tableau said.

The company believes scaling up data analytics has proven to be challenging for most organizations. It cites data from McKinsey that shows 92% of companies have failed in their endeavors. But those companies really need to do so, as a separate study by Gartner Inc. forecasts that 80% of firms wishing to scale up their digital business through 2025 will fail to do so by not taking a more modern approach to data analytics and governance.

New features meant to help companies overcome these challenges include Linked Tasks in Tableau Prep, the company’s data preparation tool, which makes it easier to reduce the load and costs of server resources automatically. Meanwhile, the Prep Conductor feature makes it easier to create rows and map out trends in data, Tableau said.

On the governance side, Tableau gains new alert features to help customers maintain data quality. A notification is sent when any potential issues are spotted, giving users more visibility into the the problem and where it came from. The release also adds centralized row level security features that enable more flexibility and segmentation of data. Tableau administrators can now centrally configure which users and groups have access to specific slices of data, the company said.

With regard to scaling up analytics, the most important update is a new enterprise reference architecture called Enterprise Deployment Guidelines. This bundles a basic reference architecture for enterprise customers with a prescriptive methodology that will help them to achieve the highest possible requirements around availability, scalability and security, Tableau said. Best of all, the reference architecture is technology and platform-independent, meaning it can be applied to any cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

Later this year, the company said in a blog post, an enterprise reference architecture with a tiered topology will allow information technoloyg teams to deploy Tableau with an industry-standard approach to availability, performance, security and compliance, and scalability. Each layer of server application functionality is bound and protected by access control-led subnets, the company added.

Also new is a Dynamic Scaling feature that customers can use to provide adequate resources for their Tableau deployments and ensure they have enough software containers available during peak demand times, while reducing the load at times of lower demand. Moreover, the new release adds the ability to define application resource limits.

In additional, the company is promising new enterprise subscription plan options it says will make it easier for customers to procure and deploy Tableau across an entire organization. To that end, Tableau will bundle its Creator, Explorer, and Viewer licenses for Tableau Online with Data Management, and Data Management plus Server Management for Tableau Server. That means, it added that companies can more easily procure and deploy these capabilities.

Analyst Doug Henschen of Constellation Research Inc. said the growing volumes of data faced by most organizations today means information technology teams face unprecedented challenges when it comes to dealing with it.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for maintaining and securing systems that increase data self-sufficiency and empower everyone to do more with data,” he said. “It’s no longer a luxury for businesses to have a data analytics platform, it’s a necessity that could make the difference between surviving and thriving.”

Tableau said the new data prep, catalog features and subscription plans will be available in the Tableau 2021.3 release later this month, with the other new capabilities to arrive in the coming months.

Image: Tableau