Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky speaks at Tableau Conference 2016. Tableau Software Photo.
Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky is a former Amazon Web Services executive. Tableau Software Photo.

Seattle-based Tableau Software is making a big move into the public cloud, expanding the subscription-based, hosted version of its data visualization technology, Tableau Online, beyond its own data centers and onto Amazon Web Services for the first time.

It’s a notable customer win for AWS, and a first step by Tableau in a larger effort to give its fastest-growing product a bigger global footprint. The move will help Tableau “support growing customer demand and rapidly expand to more regions,” the company said.

577817_imagesindevices-intl_tourismUsing a public cloud platform like AWS can provide a fast-track for expansion — something that new Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky knows well as a former AWS executive.

As of tonight, Tableau Online is officially up and running on Amazon Web Services in the US-East Region, supplementing Tableau’s own data centers in California and Dublin, Ireland.

Tableau also partners with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to support customers who migrate Tableau’s traditional on-premises technology, Tableau Server, to the public cloud. However, as the company investigated its own public cloud options, it found that a large number of its customers are migrating those installations to AWS. Many customers are also using Amazon to store the underlying data used to create visualizations in Tableau.

“It seemed like a natural fit to put our SaaS-hosted product on the platform that most of our customers are choosing right now,” explained Ashley Kramer, Tableau’s director of product management for cloud strategy, via phone this evening from Las Vegas, where AWS is holding its annual re:Invent conference this week.

Asked if Tableau would ever drop its own data centers and shift Tableau Online entirely to AWS, Kramer said the company would evaluate the situation and weigh its options, based on the needs of its customers, but no decision has been made at this point.

Tableau CEO Selipsky told Fortune’s Barb Darrow that he isn’t concerned about Amazon Web Services expanding into Tableau’s traditional turf with its own AWS data analytics products. He cited the value of Tableau’s AWS partnership and called business intelligence and data analytics “very large market segments” with room for multiple players.

The company says Tableau Online has 5,000 customers in more than 100 countries.

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