Multiple Data Sources? Not a Problem for this Marketing Maven

As a major marketing company, Merkle is used to handling data from all kinds of sources. And with a number of big-name clients in multiple industries—including Dell, MTV, Susan G. Komen, and Bank of America—the marketing giant is regularly using Tableau with myriad data sources.

“It’s actually spreading like wildfire across our entire organization,” says Senior Business Intelligence Analyst David Andrade about Tableau. In this interview, he explains why Merkle uses Tableau for both internal projects and client-facing communications.

"At Merkle we deal with all sorts of data," says David Andrade. "We do big data, we do medium data, we do small data. We do all the data."

According to Andrade, Merkle primarily connects Tableau to data stored in SQL Server—but also to a number of other sources, including Salesforce. “There are a number of different data sources that we can connect to,” he says. “The sky’s the limit with Tableau. As long as you have data, you can build it.”

Since Merkle handles data in so many forms, this flexibility is a major reason for Tableau's growing ubiquity in the organization. Merkle is using Tableau Desktop to build client-facing dashboards, which it shares via Tableau Server. And internally, says Andrade, “every day it seems like I’m getting new requests for people to get Desktop licenses, because everyone just wants to get their hands on it.”

"Tableau Server helps us automate dashboarding for our clients," says Andrade. This frees up more time to focus on marketing insights.

Find out why this marketing maven can't get enough of Tableau! Watch the full interview now.