Who`s "the next Tableau"? Is it getting stormy for Tableau, PowerBi and Qlik?

It's worthwhile to consider what made Tableau a successful disrupter. When Tableau came to market it was a data visualization tool first and foremost in an age when business data analysis was dominated by the big platforms at the enterprise end, Excel was the universal personal chart-building tool, with programmatic/technology/drawing approaches pretty much filling out the available options. Tableau was revolutionary in its presentation of a visual workspace integrated with a visualization heuristics system. The workspace presented data as analytically meaningful fields, and a visual drawing space providing both the model and content of the data visualizations that were constructed through combinations of analyst actions - double-clicking and dragging/dropping fields, and Tableau's responses to those actions. This was a dramatic improvement over the traditional approach of applying fields to selected chart types. In inverting the analytical process from technology-centric to human-centric Tableau made free-form data exploration possible, contrasted with the traditional technological approaches that required the development of predetermined visualizations. This changed the game, making it possible for nontechnical people to visually analyze the data that mattered to them, and for technical people to instantly understand their data with a quantum leap in their ability to achieve their analytical goals. I started using Tableau in 2006 because it made my BI consulting work much easier. I was able to reach levels of understanding of data in hours that would take my technical peers days or weeks to achieve. One result is that Tableau enabled me to rescue traditional BI projects that had lost their way because they'd become oriented towards building BI infrastructure instead of helping decision makers understand the data that mattered to them. Fast forward. Tableau has consistently evolved towards being more of an enterprise product, even as it leaves significant gaps in its initial direct visual analysis model. In doing so it's become more like the enterprise products it's increasingly being compared with, while doing little to improve the lives of those people who simply need to understand the data that matters to them. The 'next Tableau' will be the product that did what Tableau did over a decade ago: make it simple, easy, and straightforward for nontechnical people to access and analyze their data. There's plenty of room for improvement here. Even addressing Tableau's flaws in the space it already covers will be a big step forward. Expanding the horizon of the analytical opportunities accessible directly and obviously will be a game changer. The company that delivers the product that can do these things will be the next great data visual analytics success.

The big 3 cloud providers are the biggest threat to the mainstay viz vendors.

Mohammad Elteibi