Tableau Outlines Vision and Future of Analytics at Tableau Conference 2021

Tableau, the world’s leading analytics platform (NYSE: CRM) is sharing its vision to make analytics more powerful, trusted, collaborative and easier to use. The Tableau Conference keynote will introduce new and future innovations to help anyone, anywhere, work with any data through collaborative analytics, AI-powered insights, trusted data at scale and an expanded platform and ecosystem. The event will also showcase customers like Lyft, the Seattle Seahawks and Jaguar Land-Rover who will share how data culture is helping them succeed in the digital-first world.

“Lyft’s mission is to improve people's lives with the world's best transportation and there’s no way to do that without leveraging data in everything we do,” said Heather Torres, Head of People Analytics & Strategy, Lyft. “Our strong data culture paired with the right technology has helped unlock new ways to work, measure our progress and build teams that better reflect the communities we serve.”

For digital businesses, harnessing data can be the difference between staying ahead or falling behind. A recent IDC^<1> study found that while data itself does not guarantee success, enterprises with strong data cultures are more likely to have a competitive advantage, increase profits and retain customers.

“By now, every organization should recognize the importance of creating a strong data culture,” said Chandana Gopal, Research Director, Future of Intelligence, IDC. “Whether it’s increased revenues or optimized operations, data cultures are proven to make a positive impact on businesses of all sizes. The challenge now is enabling people with the right technologies to drive value and become insights-driven.”

At Tableau Conference, Tableau is not only introducing new and future product innovations, the company is also strengthening the Tableau Economy – a growing ecosystem of businesses, partners and people leading the world’s data transformations.

Highlights include:

• Making analytics more collaborative and accessible by bringing innovation to where people work. Slack-First Analytics will help everyone access insights from Tableau directly from Slack.
  • Ask Data in Slack allows anyone to talk to their data. Customers can ask questions using natural language and automatically get rich data visualizations as answers.
  • Explain Data in Slack helps customers understand the “why” in their data with AI-driven explanations behind the trends in a dataset.
  • Einstein Discovery in Slack provides predictions in the flow of work. Business people can run AI predictions on their most important business data to get intelligent predictions that identify leading causes and produce actionable recommendations on next steps.

• Expanding Business Science capabilities to empower customers to not only see and understand data, but to drive better decision-making through the latest AI technologies.
  • Model Builder enables business teams to collaboratively build and consume predictive models, using the Einstein Discovery engine, without having to leave their Tableau workflows. With Model Builder, people can build models to help them predict and plan for their future sales.
  • Scenario Planning will help customers make better decisions by comparing alternative scenarios, building robust models and understanding expected outcomes, all supported by Einstein AI.

• Trusted data at scale helps customers better manage the data within their analytics environment, ensuring that trusted and up-to-date data can be surfaced to drive decisions. Tableau is empowering customers to centrally connect, catalog, clean, curate and secure data no matter where it lives.

• • Virtual Connections enables site administrators to create access points to data sources centrally and ensure it can be shared with anyone in their organization.
  • Centralized Row-Level Security features increase flexibility and segmentation by enabling Tableau administrators to centrally configure which users and groups have access to which slices of data.
  • With Prep Extensions, customers can quickly leverage community-developed tools to simplify and augment data preparation flows. This unleashes the creativity of the community to provide more power and flexibility for data prep.
  • Share Prep Flows in Tableau Public allows people to share their flows in the community. This will help people share best practices, standardize, replicate and learn from others to increase the success of data prep processes.
  • Integrating Enterprise Data Catalogs (EDC) will help Tableau customers bring external metadata from EDCs like Collibra, Alation or Informatica into Tableau, uniting information and context in a single environment. 

• Expanding the Tableau platform and ecosystem with a series of new innovations to help customers become data-driven; partners grow a valuable business; developers easily build analytics into every app; data people build their careers and deliver insights into the flow of business.
  • Tableau Exchange is an evolution of our Extensions gallery and is Tableau’s hub of integrated products, solutions and service offerings. It provides customers with a one-stop-shop to browse offerings that can help jump start their data analysis
    • Accelerators can be found in the Tableau Exchange and help speed time to value with relevant, pre-built dashboards that broadly spans industries, lines of business and even specific Salesforce Clouds.
  • The Hire Me button in Tableau Public helps members of the data community connect to professional opportunities. With this new button, prospective employers can connect directly with authors.
  • Tableau Actions makes it easier to turn insights into action by adding context and interactivity to customers’ data. Our upcoming innovations include Tableau Actions for Salesforce Flow, which brings the power of the Salesforce Flow workflow engine to advance a business process, enabling customers to take action directly anywhere in Salesforce.
  • Enhanced embedded offerings make it easy for customers and partners to embed Tableau dashboards, Ask Data, and Metrics into their applications and make any app an analytical app.
  • Connected Applications gives site administrators the ability to set up a trusted relationship with virtually any external service using standard protocols. This will help customers streamline user authentication while prioritizing security and ease of use.

“Helping people see and understand data is what drives us,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Tableau. “Whether you’re an analyst, business person, IT manager or developer, we’re making analytics easier, faster and more actionable for anyone, anywhere. By bringing analytics directly where work happens, making it smarter and more actionable, and enabling self-service data management, we will enable more organizations to build a data culture and drive analytics success.”

The Tableau Exchange, Tableau Accelerators in the Exchange, Hire Me button in Tableau Public, Virtual Connections and Centralized Row-Level Security features are now available. Connected Applications will be available soon with Tableau 2021.4. The other innovations are coming next year.