Tableau Software: William Blair Positive Customer Checks

Conversations with attendees of Alteryx Inspire 2016, an annual user event held in San Diego, indicate that the shift to self-service analytics remains intact, William Blair’s Bhavan Suri said in a report. He maintained an Outperform rating for Tableau Software Inc DATA, saying that customer feedback had been positive.

Data Preparation Is Hot

Alteryx’s customer base had grown 100 percent over the past 12 months. “This confirms what we have been hearing in our recent industry conversations, which is that demand for self-service data preparation solutions is accelerating,” analyst Bhavan Suri commented. He said that this was not surprising since data preparation activities accounted for ~80 percent of the time spent on typical analytics projects.

“We expect demand for these solutions to remain robust as more nontechnical information workers who are relatively new to visualization tools move up the learning curve and look to enrich their analyses via the addition of new data sources,” Suri wrote.

Continued Shift To Self-Service

“Customers and partners signaled an overwhelming preference for self-service technologies at all levels of the analytics stack,” the analyst mentioned. He noted the reasons as:

• Improved organizational decision making achieved by democratizing analytics
• Increased organizational agility realized through the reduction of IT complexity
• Significant cost savings via migration away from expensive legacy solutions that require costly IT resources for operation

“Although competition is picking up across all segments of the market (most notably visualization), we believe vendors with strong technology differentiation are positioned to benefit from long-lasting secular tailwinds,” the William Blair report stated.

Tableau Cross-Read

Feedback from customers and partners had been mostly positive. Suri expects deal activity to be sufficient to result in modest sales upside in the current quarter.