{"id":4916,"date":"2015-12-09T23:24:58","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T04:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/bcci-the-800-pound-gorilla-of-cricket\/"},"modified":"2015-12-09T23:24:58","modified_gmt":"2015-12-10T04:24:58","slug":"tableau-managing-the-data-explosion","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/tableau-managing-the-data-explosion\/","title":{"rendered":"Tableau: Managing the data explosion"},"content":{"rendered":"

90% of the World’s data was created in the last two years. \u00a0Currently doubling in size every couple of\u00a0years, it is likely to reach 44\"Data_Growth_1\" zettabytes by 2020. That is 44 trillion gigabytes.\u00a0[1] Helping manage this kind of exponential growth in data, Tableau was an idea that originated out of a Department of Defense project in conjunction with\u00a0Stanford university to help organize and visualize data from relational databases. [2] Founded by an ensemble cast of an academy award winning\u00a0university professor, a computer scientist and a savvy business leader, it has grown from an obscure startup to a $6 billion dollar company in little over a decade. We’re going to explore the reasons for this runaway success story in the below report.<\/p>\n

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Tactical to Practical : Mission to simplify data<\/strong><\/p>\n

While it might have\u00a0started off as a defense project, Tableau’s\u00a0founders were quick to identify its \u00a0potential and expand it to commercial applications. As the number of smart devices touches\u00a02 billion, the number of people uploading photos, videos, text and other content is rapidly\u00a0increasing. With a mission to make breakthrough products that help “people see and understand data”, Tableau wants to give users\u00a0the power of data at their fingertips. And this is Tableau’s niche: Simplifying the opportunity for individuals and enterprises to use data to learn about customers habits, demand patterns and supply side constraints.<\/p>\n

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\"tableau-logo-USE-THIS-ONE\"<\/p>\n

A Solution For Everyone<\/strong><\/p>\n

To achieve their strategic goals, Tableau needed to\u00a0find\u00a0widespread adoption across sectors and\u00a0industries. They did this and created value for their customers by allowing their customers to connect large databases and parse through the data quickly and easily. This also includes interpreting data realtime (when connected to a live database), enabling dynamic filtering and converting SQL entries to immediately usable visual reports. Simultaneously, the products needed to be priced in a manner to allow for both large corporations as well as small industries\u00a0to be able to use their service. Most importantly, people without significant experience in SQL should be able to easily and intuitively learn adopt it.\u00a0Finally, it needed to be scaleable such that once a consumer is on Tableau, they should be able to enhance\u00a0features and services when new terminals were\u00a0added without having to lose data or configuration in transition.<\/p>\n

“The fundamental innovation is a patented query language that translates your actions into a database query and then expresses the response graphically. The breakthrough was the ability to do ad-hoc analysis of millions of rows of data in seconds with Tableau’s Data Engine.” [3]<\/em><\/p>\n

Keeping in mind their industry application but wanting to reach out to large as well as smaller customer accounts,\u00a0Tableau primarily offers three products to consumers [4]<\/p>\n