Tableau Soups Up Its Business Intelligence Software
Business intelligence software is notoriously complex and can be difficult to use besides being resource-intensive.
Tableau Software this week announced the release of version 6 of the company's business intelligence software of the same name, which was designed for easy use, intuitive graphics, and high performance.
At the top of the list of updates, Tableau 6 features a new data engine that the company claims is 100 times faster than the previous version.
“Our new Tableau Data Engine achieves instant query response on hundreds of millions of data rows, even on hardware as basic as a corporate laptop,” Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau Software, said in a statement.
“And it integrates with our ability to ‘direct connect' to virtually any database. No other platform allows companies to choose in-memory analytics on gigabytes of data or ‘direct connect' to data warehouses like Teradata,” he added.
Version 6 also adds some tweaks to how it interacts with Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) SharePoint collaboration and document management server.
Version 5.2, which was released last spring, added support for SharePoint 2010. Tableau 6 features additional capabilities, including improvements to the ability to connect directly to Microsoft's PowerPivot Excel add-in and to publish to SharePoint, Elissa Fink, Tableau's vice president of marketing, told InternetNews.com.
Another new feature added in Version 6 is the ability to blend multiple data sources with a single click, company statements said. Data can be combined from sources as diverse as Excel spreadsheets, to text files, to enterprise databases.
The update also adds in-memory analytics, the company said.
Tableau 6 began beta testing in late August with 1,000 customers. The company, which is headquartered in Seattle, began in 2004 as a Stanford University spin-off project.
The release of Tableau 6 comes approximately a month after Tableau announced that, as of the close of its third fiscal quarter, the company's sales grew 123 percent year over year.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.
