Seattle technology company Tableau released a new product and pricing model Tuesday, moves to make it more appealing to big companies as Tableau squares off with Microsoft and other competitors.
The company, which develops software to create various visualizations of data, launched new technology that helps workers quickly sort and prepare massive amounts of data before analyzing it.
Tableau Prep, as it's called, will take data from many sources and let customers fix problems and combine all the data together before transferring it into the main Tableau product.
At the same time, Tableau's prices will shift a bit to accommodate the technology. Prep will be added at no extra charge for customers who have licenses to the full Tableau desktop and server technology, which costs $70 a month per person.
A mid-tier for $35 a month allows people to analyze data that is already in the system, no Prep included.
The newest pricing tier, called Viewer, costs just $12 a month and allows people to see and tweak finished data visualizations. This tier is likely to be attractive to big companies, who want hundreds of employees to have access to data analytics, but have no need for all those users to create visualizations.
"That will open up those deals that they would never get otherwise," said industry analyst Jen Underwood, founder of Impact Analytix, an analytics consulting firm.
"Cleaning" data is a common issue that non-analysts take for granted. Before information can be made into charts and maps, it first needs to be put into one system and needs to be standardized. A data set with names of states, for example, will need to use the same type of abbreviation for each state.
Companies say the majority of time spent dealing with data analysis is actually the preparation piece, not the analysis.
Tableau Prep makes it intuitive and visual to sort the data, Underwood said, which she expects will make it attractive to companies.
Customers were constantly asking Tableau to add ways to prepare data, CEO Adam Selipsky said, so the company started working on a product a couple years ago, then under the name Project Maestro.
The preparation piece of Tableau users' data analysis has been done mostly by other companies that partner with Tableau, such as Alteryx, which have separate contracts with many Tableau users. Tableau Prep could have ramifications for these vendors.
Having both preparation and visualization functions in one place will appeal to many Tableau users, but not all will switch over right away, Underwood said. Most likely, companies will keep using the preparation technology they're currently on until their contracts run out or they decide it's worth it to move over, she said.
Tableau's prep product currently works only with its own analysis technology, so Underwood doubts it will take a big bite out of vendors' business.
