The changes at Tableau Software in the eight months since CEO Adam Selipsky succeeded co-founder Christian Chabot have been “pretty radical,” says Dan Murray, director of strategic innovation at InterWorks, one of Tableau’s earliest partners if not the first.
“There’s been pretty much of a brain-ectomy” over the last few months, he told me by phone on Friday. People have been leaving.
Whether that’s good or bad might depend on your point of view. To Dan, there’s only good news in the department he cares about most: The development team seems to be intact and performing as well as ever.
He mentioned two technologies in particular whose potential is much greater than most people realize: One that’s already part of Tableau is the data interpreter, the Excel ingest tool. He asks people if they use it, and they shrug. It’s not sexy. “This is going to do a lot more in the next couple of years,” he said.
The other widely underestimated technology is Hyper, the Munich-developed database technology acquired by Tableau in 2016. He compares the potential to the first great re-engineering of the Tableau extract engine five versions back.
The new CEO, Adam Selipsky, “isn’t nearly the stage presence [of Chabot], but he’s a detail freak,” he said. The consensus among employees he’s talked to is that this should have happened a few years ago. “He’s very, very deeply engaged in the business at every level.”
With Seplisky, he said, “you don’t get the husky-eyeball treatment and wow factor [as with Chabot]. But all the employees who’ve been there a while the the tech, operational types are really impressed with the guy. He’s much more in command of the business aspects, more detail oriented.”
He sees new, more seasoned managers coming in. In sales, he said, Tableau now seems friendlier to partners. “The business getting to size where they need a vertical focus,” he said. “It’s the natural evolution.”
What are Tableau’s prospects now as it hurdles toward maturity? “I think they’ve got a lot of juice left in them.”
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