If you’ve been to a big vendor-neutral tech conference focused on analytics and BI over the last few years, it’s hard to miss the two companies in a horse race for the biggest, most enthusiastic installed base — Microsoft’s Power BI technology and Tableau. These two were also far ahead of the rest in the Leaders square of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for analytics and BI released in early 2019. (Although it’s fair to point out the two other Leaders — Qlik and ThoughtSpot.)

This week Salesforce changed the shape of that race by acquiring data visualization giant Tableau, a company with enterprise customers that have included GoDaddy, Nissan, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase — more than 86,000 organizational customers total. The stock deal was worth $15.7 billion. It’s not the first big deal in the analytics and BI space in the last few months. Google also recently announced that it would acquire Looker (another company featured on Gartner’s analytics and BI Magic Quadrant report.) Also, Sisense (in the Visionaries square of the Gartner Magic Quadrant) recently merged with Periscope Data (which got an honorary mention in the Gartner report).

Source: informationweek.com
Author: Jessica Davis