Tableau…Salesforce… & Dreamforce: The Future is Bright

The recent Dreamforce ’24 conference was bound to be a bellwether for the Tableau user community. Acquired by Salesforce in August of 2019, concern over the future of Tableau was growing, in spite of Salesforce’s initial assertions that they were focused on “bringing together the world’s #1 CRM with the world’s #1 analytics platform.”

The history of software acquisitions left many people in doubt, as mergers were often done not to unite technologies, but to acquire a client base. The corresponding technology would “come along for the ride”, and were soon “end-of-life’d” and left on the scrap-pile of good (but not good-enough) solutions.

Adding to Tableau users’ concern was the fact that the Salesforce CRM solution already had a BI/AI component – called “Einstein”. The prospect of Salesforce focusing on its own internally-developed BI/AI component in favor of a newly-acquired solution seemed like a possibility.

With all of this, many Tableau users looked at the Salesforce acquisition with a jaded outlook. Since 2019, they had feared of hearing about departures of key individuals from the Tableau workforce, and were wondering whether Tableau would recede into the background of Salesforce’s solutions.

And Tableau users were right to have these concerns . . . until recently.

In 2024, it became clear that the tide had turned – in favor of Tableau. The Tableau side of Salesforce started aggressively hiring key personnel. And, in the biggest and best piece of news for the Tableau community, Salesforce announced the ‘end-of-life’ for their old Einstein BI/AI technology. (The Einstein brand has been repackaged to use the Tableau technology).

Additional joint messaging from Salesforce and Tableau leadership confirmed that although Salesforce’s expertise lay primarily within the CRM world, the Tableau solution would continue to be positioned as an enterprise-wide solution that encompasses CRM and related solutions such as ERP, HR, and others.

According to Marc Benioff, Chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, the appeal of Tableau for BI and AI went far beyond customer-based intelligence.

“Together we can transform the way people understand not only their customers, but their whole world—delivering powerful AI-driven insights across all types of data and use cases for people of every skill level.”

At the ‘Dreamforce 2024’ conference for the Salesforce community, the key Tableau takeaways were:

• Salesforce is dedicated to the Tableau solution, including further investment and a very bright future.
• Tableau will be the backbone ‘BI Stack’ for Salesforce’s platform.
• Tableau’s AI components will focus on business issues, and have more emphasis on data security than other BI/AI solutions.
• Salesforce expects a significant growth of Tableau users based on the size of the Salesforce user community (24 million users, up from 3 million in 2019).

DataSelf’s partnership with Tableau will also continue to grow, with particular emphasis on further enhancing the ETL+ Data Warehousing solution as a complement to Tableau’s BI and AI technologies. Learn more about how DataSelf supercharges BI-tools like Tableau to provide advanced analytics for more informed decision making.