SalesForce has been pushing Einstein Analytics recently. I haven't used it, but I do see that moving an organization from Tableau to Einstein has a lot of costs involved so this would be a hard sell in many places. Having them both under one roof means they're able to bring a bunch of people across to their cloud and now that license revenue year over year is theirs with the additional data lock-in.

As someone that really dislikes vendor-forced lock-in and generally dislikes the way SalesForce controls your data, rate limits, maxes, licensing, etc, this move is about even more control up your stack that will seem like a "no brainer" to decisionmakers, which is dangerous. That said, I'm sure it will work well for some organizations.

EDIT: I would also love to see them spit out D3 or other open visual but then they'd be losing control of the secret sauce and the requirement for a license. Not sure there is an incentive to go that route.

Precisely what I thought. It looks like their annual revenue is ~ $1 billion, placing this price around 15x annual revenue.

However, Looker has about $131 million in revenue, so their purchase price was an even higher 20x annual revenue.

My conclusion is that these acquisitions are much less about sales revenue and much more about filling strategic holes in product offerings, and I can only assume it's a sellers market in that area.

At $1B/year in revenue there aren't a lot of companies that can realistically acquire you. At $131MM/year, there are.

But still I agree. Both are quite high.

CRM is a pretty darn good ticker for Salesforce. Why would you change it? It perfectly explains your core business

You make it sound like the ticker symbol justifies a $15.7B price tag...

I think we are many years away from $15B vanity ticket symbols.

https://interworks.com/blog/ksloan/2019/04/03/the-2019-gartn...

Perhaps in 5 years we'll look back at this move as a prime example of the bubble we're currently in.

However, 'Tableau Research' [2] has existed for years and its researchers regularly publish at major academic visualisation conferences like IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST) and EuroVis (see [3]).

[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/tableau-acquires-mit-ai-spinof...

[2]: https://research.tableau.com/

[3]: https://research.tableau.com/papers

Can you clarify?

It would be nice if tableau would just generate static content that could be hosted anywhere.

There’s not a client tool for d3 as nice as tableau. I work with lots of scientists who learned tableau but aren’t really programmers and can’t figure out d3 or other libraries.