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Tableau history
Tableau company history timeline
Tableau was founded by Pat Hanrahan, Christian Chabot, and Chris Stolte from Stanford University in 2003.
Both are illustrated in v1.0 (April 2005)—connecting live to databases allowed customers to access their fast data computation investments and Pause Automatic Updates allowed the user to do a bunch of drag-and-drop before running slow data computations.
The ability to join tables in Tableau was added in v2.0 (June 2005) with both a dialog and the RAWSQL function in the calculation language.
The “computer assistance” history shown with the innovation category widget starts with Show Me v1.5 (Oct 2005) where the computer recommended visual encodings of data to analysts who had only been working with grids of numbers.
Release v2.0 (June 2006) included Quick filter widgets, which allowed consumers to do one of the most useful analytical operations.
To compete, Tableau has to convince people it is an indispensable data platform and not just a tool for building pretty charts. "That's what they said about Business Objects," says Wedbush Securities analyst Steve Koenig, referring to the company SAP bought for $6.8 billion in 2007.
The first Tableau Conference in 2008
Sales grew at an average annual pace of 82% over the last seven years, from $18 million in 2009 to $654 million last year, and Tableau now serves 39,000 customers, including Wells Fargo, Dow Chemical, SpaceX and the Texas Rangers.
Hence the company which was once considered to be sold in 2010 grew like anything gaining the customer base of more than 60,000 which will be growing in the future.
Tableau's founders seriously considered selling the company for about $250 million back in 2010.
The next major authoring moment was our free product Tableau Public in v5.1 (Feb 2010), which allowed students, bloggers, and data journalists to share data visualizations more broadly on the web.
The company launched its first IPO in 2013 and raised $250 million and never looked back.
The Data Tab was added in v8.2 (June 2014) to give people who understand joins a better experience than a dialog.
In August 2016, Tableau announced and appointed Adam Selipsky as president and CEO of the company.
In August 2016, Tableau announced the appointment of Adam Selipsky as president and CEO, effective September 16, 2016, replacing co-founder Christian Chabot as CEO.
Tableau's big fourth-quarter loss, including a sizable miss on the 2016 sales forecast, revealed just how overstretched the company was from all that growth.
The company has since expanded its Fremont headquarters and announced plans in 2016 for an auxiliary campus in suburban Kirkland, Washington.
The next step in this history was Table & Join Recommendations in v10.3 (May 2017), which was Tableau’s first exploration of Machine Learning (ML) technology to provide computer assistance.
The multiple table vector took a significant step forward with Tableau Prep, a new product added in Tableau 2018.1 (April 2018), which focused on users who do understand joins and curating federated data sources.
In June 2018, Tableau acquired Empirical Systems, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based artificial intelligence startup, with plans to integrate the company's technology into the Tableau platform.
Another key data computation moment was Hyper in v10.5 (Jan 2018), which supercharged Tableau extracts with an in-memory data engine technology, designed for fast data ingest and analytical query processing on large or complex data sets.
On June 10, 2019, Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in an all-stock deal worth over $15 billion.
Automatic presentation similar to Show Me was used in more recent features, including Ask Data in Tableau 2019.1 (Feb 2019) and Explain Data in Tableau 2019.3 (Sept 2019). (See the “self-service analysis” choice in the innovation category widget.)
Relationships in Tableau 2020.2 (May 2020) shifted sheets to a multiple-table data model, where the sheet’s fields allow the computer to write much more efficient queries to the data sources.
Salesforce has accelerated Tableau’s exploration of ML, including with Einstein Discovery in Tableau in Tableau 2021.1 (March 2021).
In March 2021, Tableau announced the appointment of Mark Nelson as president and CEO, replacing Adam Selipsky.
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Tableau competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VMware | 1998 | $13.4B | 31,000 | 2 |
| Dynatrace | 2005 | $1.4B | 3,000 | 16 |
| Citrix | 1989 | $3.2B | 9,000 | 6 |
| MicroStrategy | 1989 | $496.3M | 2,528 | 50 |
| Splunk | 2004 | $3.7B | 7,000 | - |
| Juniper Networks | 1996 | $5.1B | 9,400 | - |
| New Relic | 2008 | $925.6M | 1,934 | 91 |
| Red Hat | 1993 | $3.4B | 13,400 | 149 |
| LogMeIn | 2003 | $1.3B | 3,974 | - |
| TIBCO Software | 1997 | $1.0B | 4,200 | 6 |
Tableau history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Tableau, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Tableau. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Tableau. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Tableau. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Tableau and its employees or that of Zippia.
Tableau may also be known as or be related to Tableau, Tableau Software, Tableau Software Inc, Tableau Software Inc., Tableau Software LLC, Tableau Software, Inc. and tableau.