Tableau’s Focus On Subscription Services Is Paying Off

According to a recent MarketandMarkets report, the global advanced data visualization products market is estimated to grow 11% annually to become a $3.2 billion industry by 2021. This is among the conservative estimates for the industry. Another report expects the market to grow 22% annually to $7.7 billion by 2023from $1.9 billion in 2016. Recently, Tableau (NYSE: DATA), a leading player in the industry, reported stellar results.

Tableau’s Financials

Tableau’s second quarter revenues grew 32% over the year to $282.3 million, ahead of the Street’s forecast of $274 million. The company reported a break even quarter compared with a loss of $0.10 per share forecast by the market. This is the second consecutive quarter that Tableau surpassed earnings expectations.

By segment, license-based revenues grew 33% over the year to $137.8 million and maintenance and services revenues grew 32% to $144.4 million.

During the quarter, Tableau added 4,100 new customers, ending with a total of 78,000 customers. Annual recurring revenue grew 44% to $697.7 million with Subscription annual recurring revenue growing 181% to $291.3 million.

For the third quarter, analysts expect EPS of $0.02 on revenue of $241.04 million. For the full year, analysts expect loss of $0.17 on revenue of $971.99 million.

Tableau’s Product Expansion

Tableau has been focused on driving its subscription-based revenues, and it has seen strong traction. During the quarter, new deals that are subscription-based contributed 67% compared with 26% a year ago. Driving this adoption are recently launched subscription offerings – Tableau Creator, Explorer, and Viewer. Creator provides users with complete analytics capabilities. The Creator license includes Tableau Server or Tableau Online so that users can publish, govern, and share their work anywhere. Tableau Explorer is focused on businesses that need more autonomy to access and explore published data sources. Users of Explorer can analyze any data sources or workbooks on the server. Finally, Tableau Viewer allows organizations to extend the value of data and analytics across their entire workforce. Tableau is seeing strong adoption of these new services with customers shifting from perpetual licenses to subscriptions.

Additionally, Tableau also released an upgrade this quarter that will further open its platform to developers with new extensions API. The new API enables developers and partners to create third-party applications that can be dragged and dropped directly into Tableau dashboards. It will allow for custom visualizations and write-back to advanced and predictive analytics.

Tableau is also focusing on the AI space, and recently announced the acquisition of an AI startup Empirical Systems for an undisclosed sum. Empirical Systems specializes in automated statistics. It has built an analytics engine that automates the complex analysis and data modeling capabilities by identifying key trends or outliers with minimal manual support. Tableau plans to integrate the acquired capabilities into its platform to further simplify its service. Empirical Systems is privately held and its financials are not disclosed.

Its stock is trading at $106.82 with a market capitalization of $8.86 billion. It had fallen to a 52-week low of $68.37 in December last year. It had reached a 52-week high of $112.42 last month. The market has been pleased with Tableau. Analysts estimate that the company will scale to revenues of more than $2 billion by 2022.

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