Dan Murray’s taking on Big BI — and in just under two weeks at the Tableau Customer Conference in Seattle, he’s going to explain his four steps to rebellion — that is, “a high value, low cost BI reporting system.”

Dan devised the system when the company he worked for — which had revenue of about $70 million — couldn’t afford solutions from Big BI vendors. Bids ranged from $130,000 to $580,000.

Dan built his own with Tableau and Excel. The final cost, he writes, was $40,000 — $8000 for Tableau Desktop Pro and the rest for the database and ETL logic.

“I’m on a mission to spread this around the country,” he writes in email. “I consider to be every bit as big a revolution in data as the spreadsheet was to accountants in 1982. It’s thrilling.”