William Blair Thinks Tableau Software Will Benefit From This Secular Shift

In a report published Thursday, William Blair analysts initiated coverage of

with an Outperform rating, saying that the company is the primary beneficiary of the secular shift to self-service business intelligence. "Our survey work indicates that the perceived value of Tableau exceeds that of other self-service vendors, which has enabled the company to deliver consistently higher growth than its peers," William Blair noted. The analysts attribute Tableau's success to two "key competitive differentiators": The ability to anticipate and deliver functionality that is closely aligned with the needs of everyday business users A vibrant customer ecosystem. The analysts believe that the above factors, combined with the company's commitment to an "above-average level" of R&D investment, yield a "sustainable competitive advantage." This advantage positions Tableau to become the "front-end analytics standard across enterprises." Tableau should be able to sustain more than 20 percent growth over the next few years, since there are a number of growth drivers. The analysts identify the growth drivers as: Expanding overseas, new customer acquisition, further penetration of existing customers and investing in distribution channel, partner, and original equipment manufacturer relationships. "We view BI as one of the most attractive traditional software markets of size as a result of its growth characteristics that benefit leading innovators…In addition, in our view, the company could roughly double its total addressable market (TAM) by driving adoption among the estimated 265 million information workers who rely exclusively on spreadsheet software," the report added. The analysts estimate Tableau's market opportunity at $13.3 billion in 2015 and expect this to grow 9 percent, on average, through 2017.