A few years ago I wrote about a little known Seattle-based software vendor that specializes in cutting-edge data visualizations and whose tools were embedded in many consumer and enterprise applications.

At the time, few people had heard of them, even if they were unknowingly using the vendor’s data visualization tools (at the time Oracle, for example, OEM’ed the vendor’s technology and branded it Essbase Visual Explorer.)

Fast-forward three years and if you haven’t heard of them yet, its time to take notice. The company is called Tableau Software and its lightweight but powerful data visualization platform is the tool of choice for many Big Data enthusiasts and is quickly gaining adoption in the enterprise.

I just returned from Tableau’s user conference in Las Vegas, where CEO Christian Chabot gave a rousing keynote address to 1,400 enthusiastic Tableau customers. He juxtaposed what he calls the stodgy, bloated, inflexible BI platforms of old with Tableau’s modern, fast, easy-to-use platform. And attendees ate it up. It wasn’t unlike a revival. Tableau customers love Tableau.

Tableau CEO Christian Chabot addressing the company's 2011 user conference.

And it’s not hard to see why. While enterprise software giants like SAP, Oracle and IBM acquired their way into the business intelligence market and loaded down their BI platforms with all the usual trappings, Tableau’s technology was developed from the ground-up (the company got its start as a research product at Stanford in the late ‘90s) with a focus on data visualizations that a layman could use with little-to-no training and could be deployed and in-use in a fraction of the time of traditional BI platforms.

As Chabot put it in his keynote address, Tableau is dedicated to “human-oriented design” – creating visualization tools that compliment the way humans actually consume and process images and data. The results are more productive, more engaged workers, according to Chabot. “When people have self-service analytics tools to answer their basic questions,” he said, “they feel informed and powerful.”

To date, Tableau has delivered on its vision. The company doubled year-over-year revenue in 2010, reaching $40 million in revenue. Its customers include Big Data heavyweights like Zynga, eBay and Netflix, as well as more traditional firms such as GM and McGraw-Hill. The company plans to dedicate $200 million to research and development over the next three years.

Both industry watchers and, more importantly, end-users routinely cite Tableau’s visualizations (see examples below) as some of the best on the market, light-years ahead of the likes of SAP BusinessObjects and IBM Cognos. As for deploying the platform, Tableau’s software can be deployed on a desktop by a business user in as quickly as an hour.

Indeed, Tableau’s go-to-market strategy is to target the desktops of disgruntled BI end-users, show the power of the Tableau platform on an individual and departmental level, then grow throughout the rest of the enterprise. As part of that effort, the company released Tableau Public in 2010, which allows anyone to upload a limited amount of data to Tableau’s cloud, perform analysis and visualizations on it with Tableau’s tools, and publish the interactive results to a web page, blog or wherever – all for free. To date, over 10,000 people have published their own visualizations via Tableau Public.

Tableau: Tool or Toy?

The biggest knock on Tableau is that its platform isn’t enterprise-ready. Ronald L. Zurawski, a consultant that specializes in tailoring Tableau deployments for his enterprise customers, said he had a client refer to Tableau as a “toy, not a tool.” And to an extent that critique is correct.

Specifically, the platform lacked important data management features – metadata management, data quality capabilities, for example – that are crucial to effective business analytics. Tableau also didn’t provide any simple way for IT to centrally manage its platform. Not surprisingly, Tableau is more popular with users than with IT departments.

But Tableau is hoping to change its image and is adding a number of new enterprise-grade capabilities to its next release to give IT more control over the platform and to streamline data management tasks. Among the additions is Tableau Data Server, which will allow Tableau users to more easily share (and for IT to control access to) data sources; live connections with a number of Big Data data sources, including Teradata Aster Data, HP Vertica and Hive; and the ability to dynamically alternate between in-memory storage and third-party data sources.

ServicesANGLE

While the addition of enterprise-grade data management capabilities is needed for Tableau to maintain its momentum and reach more, larger customers, it also presents a challenge. Tableau must be careful not to become the very slow, bloated, cumbersome BI vendor its been criticizing for all these years. The minute Tableau requires an army of IT administrators to deploy, teams of developers to build dashboards, and legions of consultants to train end-users, the company will have lost its advantage.

The company also has competition to deal with in the form of QlikTech. QlikTech takes a similar approach to business intelligence  — lightweight, quick deployment, powerful analytics built on an in-memory engine – and completed a successful IPO last year. Other small but hungry and nimble BI vendors like Panopticon and Yellowfin are also nipping at Tableau’s heels.

Tableau is entering a critical phase in its lifecycle. The pressure is on for the company to maintain its image with end-users as a lightening fast, powerful, easy-to-use data visualization platform, while convincing IT that it can play responsibly in the enterprise.