Tableau Is Counting On Product Upgrades For Market Expansion

According to a recent report published by SBWire, the global Data Visualization Applications Market is currently growing at an annualized rate of 10% each year. The market growth is driven by escalation in big data, advancements in visualization software, and the increasing need for faster decision making. Another report published earlier this year estimates the data visualization market to grow to $7.7 billion by 2023, growing 22% annually. But despite the steady growth rate, Tableau’s (NYSE: DATA) recently reported quarterly results failed to impress the market.

Tableau’s Financials

Tableau’s third quarter revenues came in at $239.6 million, missing the Street’s forecast of $242.8 million. The company ended the quarter with a net loss of $71.3 million, compared with a loss of $46.6 million reported a year ago. On a per-share basis, it had a loss of 86 cents. Adjusted EPS came in at $0.07 which was better than the market’s forecast of a loss of $0.10 per share.

By segment, revenues from the licensing segment grew 19% over the year to $118 million. Maintenance and service revenues grew 5% over the year to $121.6 million.

Tableau’s Product Expansion

During the quarter, Tableau remained focused on driving product innovation. It is currently working on a feature called Ask Data that leverages natural language processing to help people ask questions about their data in an intuitive, conversational manner.

Another feature is currently in the beta stage of testing. Some of the other features in beta stage include the Tableau Prep Conductor, part of the Tableau Prep service launched earlier this year. Tableau Prep is a data preparation product designed to allow customers to quickly combine, shape and clean their data, further reducing the time from data to insight. Tableau Prep Conductor provides them with a scalable, reliable, and secure server environment to run these Tableau Prep flows.

Besides product growth, Tableau is also expanding its footprint through several tie-ups. It recently expanded its partnership with AWS, Informatica and Unifi through new product integrations. It also launched additional Dashboard Extensions with other partners including Mapbox and DataRobot. As part of its plans to expand the global partner program, Tableau has launched new certifications and trainings and is bundling them with support services for its customers.

More recently, Tableau released its latest upgrade, version 2018.3 that comes with features such as maps that help users find patterns in a set of data and actions that enable interactive analytics.

Tableau has been focusing on driving its customers to a subscription based model and it has seen strong success in the area. As part of this effort, it has launched several new subscription pricing models, the key one being a role based subscription offering that was released earlier this year. The feature allows customers to customize Tableau subscriptions for its user base. The recently reported quarter was the first complete quarter for role-based subscription launch, and Tableau has been pleased with the customer adoption rates so far.

Tableau’s impressive product line up has made it a leader in Gartner’s magic quadrant for analytics and Business Intelligence tools this year, along with the likes of Microsoft with its Power BI and Qlik. But more recently, the company is facing stiffer competition from Domo which is adding to its customer base at a much rapid clip. Right now though, Domo is a much smaller player. Analysts believe that Tableau currently accounts for 4.9% market share compared with 0.6% share for Domo.

Its stock is trading at $119.66 with a market capitalization of $9.93 billion. It had fallen to a year low of $68.37 in December last year. Like most other stocks, Tableau’s stock had slipped last month.

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