Walking into the “Data1” building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, it’s not easy to tell it’s the home of Tableau, with the big Salesforce sign behind the reception desk, and a lack of obvious branding for the data visualization company.
This symbolizes one challenge that Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay has faced in his first nine months in the role: ensuring that Tableau can maintain its unique approach, identity, and focus — catering to its intensely loyal community of data professionals and analysts, while also serving Salesforce’s broader base of business customers.
“The community is a bunch of raving fans. Who wouldn’t want that?” he said in an interview with GeekWire this week, wearing a “DataFam” lapel pin in a nod to Tableau’s longtime name for its legions of users and supporters.
He recalled saying, in essence, “Let me tell you about Tableau,” in meetings with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and other leaders at the San Francisco-based cloud giant, which acquired Tableau for $15.7 billion in 2019.
Yes, he explained, Tableau can deliver significant value to Salesforce’s core customer-relationship management customers. But it still needs to market and pay attention to the needs of the people who’ve helped to make Tableau a pioneer in self-serve data analytics over the course of two decades.
“Salesforce didn’t fully get that — and I know, because I was at Salesforce,” said Aytay, who was Salesforce’s chief business officer and Benioff’s chief of staff, among other roles, before he became Tableau’s chief revenue officer in 2022. He was named CEO in May, succeeding Mark Nelson, who stepped down at the end of 2022.
But at this point, Aytay said, he believes the message has been heard.
“That was probably the hardest thing I had to deal with,” he said, when asked about the biggest challenge he’s faced so far. “I feel like we’re well beyond that now.”
Resetting customer relationships
Aytay was named Tableau CEO at a pivotal moment for Salesforce and the broader industry. Salesforce cut 10% of its workforce in early 2023, and Tableau was hit hard by the cutbacks, just as the rise of generative artificial intelligence began to redefine the tech landscape.
At the same time, there were signs of Tableau’s relationship with its customers eroding.
Research firm Gartner, in its April 2023 “Magic Quadrant” report on analytics and business intelligence vendors, continued to rank Tableau as a leader in the category, with a “massive community of visual analytic developers,” but also cited customer concerns about the impact of the layoffs, and slow support times. Some customers felt compelled to purchase premium add-ons just to receive basic levels of support, the Gartner analysts wrote.
Aytay said this customer support issue has been a major focus of his V2MOM — the Salesforce method, championed by Benioff, for setting priorities and measuring success. He said the situation has improved to the point where it likely won’t be cited in the new version of the Gartner report this year, and further changes are in the works.
Another customer concern: Tableau’s product integrations with Salesforce.
“Some of Tableau’s emerging capabilities, including CRM Analytics and Data Cloud, are designed to integrate with Salesforce,” the Gartner analysts wrote in the report. “Some clients have expressed concerns about not getting the most of the combined platform if they don’t move to Salesforce. Alternatively, they will need to spend extra to get the capabilities that belong to the other product lines.”
This is where Aytay’s internal conversations with Salesforce leaders have come into play. The goal is to “make sure that any integration we do is intentional, and we’re really looking at data,” he said. “Is this really what we want to do? Or do we want to make sure that we have a very focused approach for the community?”
Rebuilding Tableau’s executive team
Part of the solution, he said, has been rebuilding Tableau’s leadership team.
Between cutbacks and departures, Tableau’s executive ranks have almost completely turned over since the Salesforce acquisition, starting with the exit of former Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky to become Amazon Web Services CEO, replacing Andy Jassy in that role after Jassy succeeded Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as CEO.
Most recently, Francois Ajenstat, a longtime product leader who had become a key public figure for Tableau in recent years, left in November to join San Francisco-based Amplitude as its chief product officer.
One of the keys, Aytay said, was naming a chief marketing officer. This position has been important for Tableau’s community historically, held for many years by Elissa Fink, a widely respected leader who retired from the role in 2018.
Elizabeth Maxson Martinet, who has worked at Salesforce since 2014 and became a Tableau vice president in 2022, was named CMO and senior vice president in November. Other additions to the Tableau senior leadership team include Southard Jones, chief product officer; and Jennifer Lagaly, chief revenue officer.
Asked about the competitive landscape, Aytay cited the existence of this dedicated executive team as a major point of differentiation between Tableau and other major players in the market — most notably Microsoft, which is bringing its Copilot AI technology to its competing Power BI data visualization platform.
“Never have I been in a room and met the Power BI CEO, or the Power BI CMO, or the Power BI CRO, because they don’t have one,” said Aytay, who oversaw Salesforce’s partnership with Microsoft in one of his prior roles. “They don’t have a business that’s focused like Tableau — they are focused on Azure and other things.”
Looking ahead, he said much of his attention now is on attempting to “drive more velocity into the product and innovation side, and get extremely aggressive in terms of what we’re bringing to market.”
AI driving products and interest
As an example, he pulled up Tableau Pulse on his phone to show how the company is using natural language and generative artificial intelligence to help businesses visualize and interpret their data. Unveiled last year, Tableau Pulse is currently in beta as an early application of the company’s underlying Tableau GPT platform.
Later this year, the company is expected to launch Einstein Copilot for Tableau, an AI tool designed to help data analysts understand and use Tableau features for creating and automating visualizations.
AI has become the overriding focus of customer conversations across the tech industry. For Tableau, this naturally leads into larger conversations about data and analytics, Aytay said. While the broader economic environment remains tough, he said, AI is making companies more open to adopting new technologies.
Tableau also benefits from Salesforce’s relationships with large enterprise customers, he said, citing as an example the major global banks that are now using Tableau, which was not the case before.
Revenue growth starts to rebound
As viewed from the outside, Salesforce has made it tougher to assess Tableau’s financial performance, opting to stop disclosing the absolute revenue of acquired companies including Slack and Tableau in its earnings reports. On a percentage basis, however, the latest results show Tableau returning to double-digit quarterly revenue growth, up 16% vs. the prior year, when adjusted for fluctuations in currency rates.
Tableau’s business has more than doubled since the Salesforce acquisition, Aytay said, declining to provide specific numbers.
Tableau had grown to about 4,200 employees worldwide before it was acquired, about half of them in the Seattle region. Prior to its cuts early last year, Salesforce employed about 4,000 people in the Seattle area, including Tableau employees. It no longer breaks out the total number of Tableau employees locally or globally.
Benioff once said the Seattle region would become the company’s “HQ2” with the Tableau deal. However, Salesforce vacated some Tableau buildings in Seattle last year, including the former Tableau headquarters in Seattle, as part of a broader reduction in the company’s global real estate footprint.
Current and former Tableau employees gathered in the Fremont neighborhood last year for an Irish Wake lamenting what they described as a loss of Tableau’s identity inside Salesforce.
In addition to pushing internally to help preserve that identity, Aytay says the company is committed to the Seattle region. He is personally based in San Francisco but comes to the Seattle office regularly. He was relishing the beautiful weather Tuesday afternoon during a brief visit to the rooftop deck of the Data1 building.
“We’re 100% invested,” he said. “And why wouldn’t you want to be in Seattle? It’s a great place.”
