Tableau to invest more than $US420m towards growth
Data visualisation company, Tableau, will be investing towards research and development, in an attempt to build the company’s growth globally, according to its A/NZ country manager, Nigel Mendonca.
He told ARN last financial year, the company invested 27 per cent of its $US413 million revenue into it and claimed that over the next two years, it will invest more than it has in its history so far.
“The data analytics and business intelligence marketplace is changing so fast that it will look so different to what it is now. We’re cognisant of the fact that we need to keep evolving to stay a step ahead of the market needs and shape some of them and the investment will aid that,” he said.
Mendonca joined the company 10 months ago as the country head, and in this new role, his job scope predominantly involves expanding the company’s reach across the region.
“We’re also looking to grow our staffing across A/NZ, at least for the next 12 months, and we’re looking to fill account management roles, pre-sales and post-sales technical support, as well as services related roles like customer advocacy managers and deployment advisors.”
Another area it will be investing heavily in is channel resources. Coming from a channel background, Mendonca claimed he understands the value of partners and what they bring to business. As such, the company will be increasing its focus on the channel.
“I see that as the single biggest opportunity for the organisation because we have invested heavily in staff but we’ve got a long way to go and our partners can certainly help us scale and deliver the value of agile analytics to customers all over the A/NZ geography.
“We’re also investing more in our channel resources – both business development as well as technical support for our channel partners. So, that includes planning, enablement, and support requirements,” he mentioned.
According to Mendonca, from a partnership point of view, the company wants to align itself with businesses that have the capability and interest to bring Tableau’s solutions to market. He added that the company is not looking for a broad scale of partners, but ones concerned about quality, reach and alignment.
“It’s about having the right conversations and making sure we can jointly be successful with them. Our solutions are made to be applicable to all industry sectors and we pride that we’re able to reach SMB organisations that previously could not afford business intelligence tools,” he said.
The company has also just released Tableau 9.1, a solution that aims to make it easier for people to analyse data from any source while in the office or on the go.
New capabilities give businesses more ways to answer questions with data, an entirely new mobile experience, new options for connecting to data and easier security and authentication for the enterprise.
“The stark reality is, there’s an enormous amount of data that’s available to businesses as compared to a few years ago. One of the biggest challenges customers are facing is what to do and how to derive value from that data. So, Tableau allows them to make sense of that overwhelming amount of data and the new features give them the ability to follow through to a logical endpoint,” he added.
