New Cloud Offering Brings Advanced Analytics to Business Users

Tableau Cloud can empower customers to make faster and more confident decisions for better, data-driven outcomes.

Salesforce has introduced Tableau Cloud, an analytics platform designed to enable customers to fully leverage Tableau’s capabilities at an enterprise level. The offering, previously known as Tableau Online, comes with new features that enhance productivity by providing intelligent and easy-to-use analytical tools, empowering users to uncover valuable insights and make data-driven decisions with confidence. As an integral part of Salesforce Customer 360, the platform allows customers to access and analyze their trusted data from a single source of truth, anytime and anywhere.

In the face of market volatility and widespread disruptions in supply chains, companies are facing increasing challenges in cost containment and business continuity. Data plays a crucial role in managing these complexities and changes. For instance, connected supply chains and production lines generate vast amounts of data, and customers expect real-time visibility into the arrival of goods.

A recent study by McKinsey revealed a strong correlation between an organization’s planning success and the adoption of advanced analytics. Data-driven supply chain management offers new opportunities to prevent disruptions and respond swiftly and confidently to unforeseen circumstances.

“Speed, ease of use and flexibility have been key differentiators for Tableau and the reasons why customers rely on us to help transform their business through data-driven decision making and increased efficiency,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Tableau at Salesforce. “With Tableau Cloud, we’re making it easier for our customers to drive even more analytics success. Tableau Cloud helps our customers deliver the analytics they need to their users, while we ensure the highest levels of trust, availability, and performance.”

Tableau leverages natural language processing and augmented analytics to enable users at all levels to make informed decisions using data. Data Stories introduces automated plain-language explanations to Tableau dashboards, enabling customers to understand and interact with data more quickly. By automating the analysis, construction, and communication of insights in a modern and easy-to-understand storytelling format, Data Stories eliminates the need to repeatedly explain dashboards, making data more accessible to business users and driving greater analytics adoption across the enterprise.

The platform is also expanding its Accelerators offering and enhancing the capabilities of the Tableau Exchange, a hub that extends the Tableau Platform and helps customers achieve faster time to value. Accelerators are ready-to-use, customizable dashboards that cater to various industries, departments, and enterprise applications, delivering quick insights and value. There are currently more than 100 Accelerators on the Tableau Exchange.

The Exchange also includes an in-product capability that allows customers to explore and use any offering directly within the Tableau product, eliminating the need for separate downloads. This seamless integration keeps users in the workflow and ensures they find the right solution when they need it.

Additionally, Tableau is introducing Advanced Management, which enables customers to manage, secure, and scale mission-critical analytics across the enterprise. Administrators can gain deeper insights into adoption and performance, utilize advanced encryption capabilities to meet security requirements, and benefit from increased capacity limits to ensure teams and individuals have access to relevant data. Some examples of these capabilities include:

• Customer-Managed Encryption Keys: This feature helps customers meet organizational compliance standards and adds an extra layer of protection for their data.
• Activity Log: Administrators can access detailed event data, enabling them to track individual usage of Tableau. It also facilitates permission auditing, providing better control over enterprise deployments. With Admin Insights, data is retained for up to one year, allowing tracking of dataset usage, license adoption, and visualization load times.

Tableau’s integration with Salesforce Customer 360 aims to empower customers to extract actionable insights from their CRM data. By leveraging the power of Einstein Discovery’s AI and ML technologies, the platform enables domain experts to make better decisions faster and with more confidence. For example, the Model Builder feature allows business teams to collaboratively build and use predictive models using the Einstein Discovery engine, all within the Tableau workflow.

The platform is also incorporating Einstein Discovery into CRM Analytics, the advanced analytics solution for CRM users, to deliver actionable insights directly within the Salesforce workflow. This integration includes the following features:

• Einstein Discovery: Text Clustering utilizes ML models to extract keywords from large text fields, quickly revealing hidden insights and enhancing decision-making.
• Einstein Discovery: Bias Detection for multiclass models expands the use cases for multi-class models by identifying and mitigating bias based on variables, eliminating the need to retrain the entire model.

In conjunction with the launch, Tableau has partnered with Snowflake to offer an extended promotional trial, providing Tableau Cloud licenses for Snowflake customers. Additionally, eligible customers can receive Snowflake credits upon converting to a Tableau Cloud subscription.

About Utility Analytics Institute (UAI)

UAI Enables Utility Transformation Through Analytics

UAI is a utility-led membership organization that provides support to the industry to advance the analytics profession and utility organizations of all types, sizes, and analytics maturity levels, as well as analytics professionals throughout every phase of their career.

Transforming into a data decision-based company is one of the most difficult transitions a utility will have to make to thrive in the new energy economy. It’s more than just managing massive amounts of data, implementing the right tools and technology, and people and process management. It’s ensuring you have proper change management processes in place to address cultural challenges, as well as data management and governance plans, and best practice and compliant security strategies in place. It’s implementing the best organizational structure for your utility, and hiring and retaining talented staff, plus so much more! UAI brings together leading utilities who are serious about tackling these challenges and together we concentrate on utility analytics.

What’s UAI Membership all about?  UAI serves multiple audiences providing different membership packages for each audience type. Learn more about how UAI unifies our community, serves each audience to help you meet your goals and address challenges, and how each audience collaborates to better serve the utility industry.

Contact Kevin Praet, Membership Relations, at kpraet@utilityanalytics.com to learn to benefits of becoming a member of Utility Analytics Institute (UAI).