New connectors for the new year: Alibaba, Qubole, Kyvos, LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Thanks to the strength of our partner ecosystem, our customers can easily integrate Tableau into their existing environments according to their specific needs and requirements. This means faster deployments, quicker time-to-value, increased adoption, and importantly, the ability to connect to data wherever it lives. That’s why we are thrilled that 2019.4 shipped with a ton of connectors to the commonly used data sources our customers love to use: from data services in China’s leading cloud platform, Alibaba, to Qubole - which brings the power of business intelligence (BI) to any data lake, to the revolutionary OLAP technology of Kyvos, and to LinkedIn’s powerful Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP).

Here’s a snapshot of Tableau’s new connectors.

At the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, China in September of 2019, Tableau announced our partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing business unit of Alibaba Group and the leading public cloud provider in China. We were thrilled to see the excitement from tens of thousands of Apsara Conference attendees, as we demonstrated how easy it is to get Tableau Server up-and-running on Alibaba Cloud and the power that self-service analytics can unlock when deployed across the enterprise.

As part of Tableau 2019.4, our customers can leverage three new Alibaba Cloud connectors directly within Tableau: MaxCompute, AnalyticDB, and Data Lake Analytics. These data services make it easier than ever for Alibaba Cloud customers to connect their data to Tableau and reap the benefits of data visualization at scale.

“Alibaba Cloud is very excited about our new integrations with Tableau’s leading business intelligence solutions,” said Feifei Li, vice president of Alibaba Group, president of Database Systems at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “In addition to Alibaba products like ApsaraDB which are already compatible with default connectors, with Tableau’s native connectivity to products including AnalyticDB and Data Lake Analytics, and MaxCompute, customers will be able to derive business insights from their operations, fueling growth in a competitive digital era.”

Tableau customers can now connect to data stored on Alibaba Cloud and deploy Tableau Server on Alibaba Cloud ECS, and scale capacity depending on real-time demands.

• A closer look at connections to Alibaba Cloud services supported by Tableau MaxCompute is a general purpose, fully managed, multi-tenancy data processing platform for large-scale data warehousing. It supports various data importing solutions and distributed computing models, helping enable users to query large datasets while reducing production costs. All this while maintaining reliable data security measures and providing stable offline analysis services for more than seven years. MaxCompute is widely used by Alibaba Group itself to help track customer behavior analysis.
• AnalyticDB helps retrieves business insights from data sourced from multiple locations and instantly processes that data in a highly concurrent and multi-dimensional analysis system. It is a real-time OLAP managed database cloud service that can churn through enormous amounts of data and provides flexible computing analysis with built-in data modeling. AnalyticsDB is compatible with MySQL protocol, including metadata information.
• Data Lake Analytics is an interactive analytics service that powers efficient data analysis in the cloud. As DLA utilizes serverless architecture, it does not require any prior setup of infrastructure or upfront management costs. The service uses SQL interfaces to interact with user service clients. Data Lake Analytics retrieves and analyzes data from multiple data sources or locations such as OSS or Table Store for optimal data processing, analytics and visualization.

We’re thrilled to continue giving customers the choice and flexibility they need to succeed on their journey to cloud-enabled business transformation -- whether that’s fully in the cloud, in hybrid environments, or just beginning to transition from an on-premises stack.

Traditionally, BI tools could not efficiently support big data sources such as data lakes, as they were optimized for querying structured data sources like data marts and data warehouses. The process was at best cumbersome, slow and costly due to manual and administrative work. In contrast, Tableau and Qubole bring the power of BI to any data lake in any file format, with the industry’s best cloud infrastructure cost controls. Combining the reliability and scalability of Tableau with Qubole’s performance and auto-scaling for analytics and machine learning, Qubole's Connector for Tableau enables faster, simpler petabyte-level querying of big data.

"Qubole and Tableau are essential elements of Expedia Group's analytics infrastructure. Our business runs on data, so it's critical for us to have up-to-date visual analytics of our information to better serve our customers—from internal billing and payment information, to partner and consumer-facing data," said Steve Davis, Chief Digital and Cloud Officer at HomeAway, an Expedia brand.

Kyvos Insights is focused on making it easy to perform analytics on massive data on the cloud or on-premise data lakes. Using its revolutionary OLAP technology, Kyvos builds a BI acceleration layer on modern data platforms that enables Tableau users to access trillions of rows of data directly from their Tableau dashboards. By connecting their data to Kyvos, customers will benefit from the scale, flexibility, and speed of implementation they need when dealing with data at massive scale and cardinality.

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps salespeople easily target, understand and engage with the right prospects- so they can spend less time formulating leads and more time closing deals, and now, it easily connects to Tableau. With this new connector, customers can drive their sales effectiveness and maximize their productivity by seamlessly analyzing their LinkedIn data within Tableau. In fact, they can go a step further by accessing Tableau’s LinkedIn Sales Navigator Dashboard Starters directly in Tableau Online or by downloading the workbooks directly here.

Connect to these data sources today!