David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to offer some insights on Tableau drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Tableau and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

Tableau Software’s products use an in-memory architecture that delivers highly interactive analyses with good performance. To achieve this performance, data is generally loaded into an in-memory database that the product manages. There is also an option to access data directly in third-party/commercial databases. The product is available on premises and as a public cloud service. The company recently added data preparation capabilities to its product line.

Tableau’s products performed best in the Capability and Reliability categories, in both of which it ranks eighth. Tableau is known for its user interface and excels at interactive analyses, including interactive visualization for use by analysts. More capabilities to communicate information in fixed formats (which are often easier for novice users to consume) and more collaboration capabilities would improve its overall ranking in our assessment.

Also, the interactive nature of Tableau makes it less adaptable to other business processes; better integration capabilities would help improve its rankings in this category. The assessment also finds that Tableau has scant information readily available to validate the value of its products such as case studies and information on services.

This assessment was based on Tableau 2018.2. Since our evaluation was completed Tableau released version 2018.3. The new version includes enhancements to visualizations and navigation, additional data connectors, new data preparation features and other new features.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about Tableau and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director