Birst and Tableau have announced a new strategic partnership to bridge their respective cloud analytics platforms. The two business intelligence (BI) giants definitely compete in the same space and are seen as foes, but Dan Jewett, VP of Product Management at Tableau notes that the connection will “elevate the analytics experience for customers.” Birst CEO Jay Larson digs deeper: “The reality is that Birst’s and Tableau’s technologies are much more complementary than competitive,” explaining this integration will mean less “trade-offs between speed, ease-of-use and data governance.” The collaboration will involve Birst funneling their cloud-based BI data stores into Tableau’s infrastructure for visualization and insight.
The alliance can be seen as the equivalent of a BI super volcano.
Both companies are well established and have made major waves in the technology space of late. Tableau last week announced the general availability of Tableau 9.0, a major upgrade to its flagship analytics offering. And Birst, for all their growth, was named the top BI company in the Cloud Business Market Study for the third-straight year by Dresner Advisory Services. Birst was also given 65 million in Series F funding on March 17.
Organizations globally will now be able to easily refine and unite their data with Birst and then seamlessly analyze it in Tableau. In traditional settings, businesses have been limited to legacy BI solutions, which although provide a broad range of features, are made up of a variety of older and non-integrated software technologies. These solutions are no longer adequate for growing digital or enterprise organizations, and have failed to deliver the speed necessary for contemporary business users. Birst and Tableau are aiming to buck those trends, allowing companies to use this solution integration in order to leverage Birst’s 2-tier data technology with Tableau’s prominence in visual analytics.
The BI industry is transforming in front of our very eyes. Organizations within the enterprise are having trouble deploying BI in different parts of their businesses. In order to avoid this, they need to unify a mix of enterprise data while giving users the speed, ease-of-access, and self-service that they need. The union of the two companies will help to create an end-to-end solution that can add value to areas all across an organization. The Birst Connector for Tableau provides a seamless connection between the two so end-users of Tableau solutions can access greater volumes of data in a more secure manner than before.
“Tableau’s mission is to help people see and understand their data. Insightful visual analytics requires access to every source of data across an organization,” said Dan Jewett, Vice President of Product Management at Tableau. “By helping Birst create a connector to Tableau, our companies are continuing this vision by elevating the analytics experience for customers.”
In this best of both worlds scenario, the consumer clearly wins.