Tableau announced yesterday at its annual user conference that it is working on a new tablet-based product called Project Elastic. In a bid to increase its outreach from enterprises to small scale businesses and consumers, their latest product aims to ‘bridge that gap,’ reports Gigaom.
As Gigaom describe, “[Elastic is] designed specifically with mobile users in mind, [and] the Elastic technology is supposed to be a paragon of intuitiveness, helping users answer the questions they have about their data using just two fingers and a modicum of brainpower. Simple, and at times even fairly complicated queries, are just a tap, swipe, scroll or pinch away.”
The product is an interesting move for the company. Tableau has consistently been ranked by Gartner as one of the top 10 software vendors globally for the last 3 years (based on software revenue, market share and growth), has a growth rate of over 80 percent, and has racked up 20,000+ customers. Yet, there is a huge market for data visualisation and access on the non-enterprise end.
Dave Story, Tableau’s vice president of mobile and strategic growth, is the man leading the charge and is armed with experience in working on consumer and small business centric products. He commented on the product yesterday, “the idea is going beyond our core audience, which has been business, and reaching out to the consumer”…“When the visualization part gets this fast, the data cleansing part overwhelmingly takes over,” he explained.
With an intention to invest exhaustively in R&D within the next two years, Elastic is being prepared for an initial release in 2015.
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(Image Credit: Esther Vargas)
