Salesforce acquires Tableau for 15.7 billion dollars

Salesforce has announced Tableau’s acquisition of $15.7 billion ($13.9 billion). Tableau is a manufacturer of business intelligence software that allows users to combine data from multiple sources into rich and easy to share visualizations.

Tableau, which was founded in 2003, itself states that it has 86,000 customers all over the world. More than 650,000 people have published visualizations on the community platform, writes Silicon Angle.

“Tableau is about people seeing and understanding their data,” says Salesforce-CEO Marc Benioff. “Salesforce is about helping people find and understand customers. Together we have the leading products in these very important categories that lie behind digital transformation.”

Although Salesforce only works in the cloud, the on premise part of Tableau was part of the company’s appeal because it gives customers the choice to run a SaaS service, or a public cloud application or on premise, says Benioff. “It offers customers incredible flexibility.”

Takeover

Although Tableau is doing well nowadays and recently even had a personal record on the stock exchange, the financial history of the company is not great. The company found it difficult to move from licensing to subscriptions while lagging behind in the transition to the cloud. By the end of 2015, the shares had fallen by 50 percent in a single day. Under the new CEO, Adam Selipsky, the value began to rise again.

Salesforce states that the acquisition, which is likely to be completed in the third quarter, will add between $350 and $400 million to the revenue of the fiscal year 2020. Tableau will continue to operate independently under its own brand and its headquarters will remain in Seattle. Salesforce also states that the current management team will remain in place.

The news of the acquisition will follow just four days after Google announced plans to acquire Tableau competitor Looker for $2.6 billion.