The power of Tableau, in the cloud

Editor’s Note: Tableau Online is now Tableau Cloud.

Ever wished you could easily share analytics with your colleagues? Ever wanted to collaborate on a dashboard with a customer or partner? Or wish you could access and work securely with data on your tablet, without having to VPN into your corporate network?

But you couldn’t. Or you could, but didn’t want to download software or spin up an IT project.

If so, then today is a big day.

Today we’re announcing Tableau Online, a hosted version of Tableau Server in the cloud. It’s the fastest way to get up and running with a complete business intelligence platform. We take care of the infrastructure, you share analytics. It’s that easy.

What’s so different about Tableau Online?

Getting started is just a matter of clicks. You can start with one user or one hundred. Scale up as fast as you want and never worry about infrastructure. When you add users, they get an email, create a username & password, and then simply go to a web page to sign in.

Tableau Online works with all your data: on-premise data and data in the cloud. You can access data from databases, data warehouses, Hadoop clusters, Excel files and cloud applications.

• If, like most organizations, your data is on-premise, you can push data to Tableau Online on a schedule.
• If you’re working with cloud services like Salesforce and Google Analytics, Tableau Online can keep your data up to date right in the cloud.
• If you’re one of those forward-thinking customers using cloud-based data warehouses like Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift, you can define a live connection between Tableau Online and that service. This means you’ll have real-time data in Tableau Online.
• All of the above? That works too. Mix and match, it all works.

Tableau Online isn’t just about sharing workbooks, it’s also about sharing data (and metadata). Tableau Online incorporates the Tableau Data Server, a component that lets you publish data sources and keep them up to date automatically. You can point your dashboards at those data sources and then they’re also kept up to date. The Data Server also lets you define and share metadata across an organization.

Tableau Online isn’t just dashboards in the cloud—it’s a robust business intelligence solution.
Read more about the Data Server.

Since Tableau Online lives in the cloud, your customers and partners need not get inside your firewall to collaborate. Many of Tableau Online’s early customers take advantage of this. For example, Bunchball uses Tableau Online to share analytics about its gamification platform with customers. Keith Conley, Director of Insight and Analytics at Bunchball, says that “this increases their level of engagement.”

Likewise, when you want to view dashboards on your iPad or Android tablet, simply point to Tableau Online and sign in. You get complete data security without needing to VPN in.

Cloud analytics is relatively new. It’s worth giving it a try. But if you later decide to bring your business intelligence on-premise, that’s fine. You can transition seamlessly to Tableau Server, or stay on Tableau Online and grow your usage as your organization grows.

In a marketplace of complex pricing grids and hidden charges, we’ve taken an approach to make the pricing model as easy to understand as possible. The price of Tableau Online is simple: It’s $500 per user, per year. No bandwidth charges, no storage charges. Every account comes with 100 GB of storage, which we expect to be adequate for the vast majority of customers.

We’ve been quietly selling Tableau Online to customers where there is a fit, and almost 200 have signed on already. We’ve learned a lot from how these early customers use the service, and they provide a point of reference for others considering analytics in the cloud.

Want to try Tableau Online? Find out more and request an invitation today. We’ll get you set up in the next few weeks. And we’d love to hear what you think.