Salesforce.com has agreed to buy big data firm Tableau Software Inc for $15.3 billion, adding muscle in its fight with Microsoft Corp for a bigger share of the market that helps businesses target customers with tools to analyse and visualise data, according to a Reuters report.
The business of analysing data is fast becoming a battleground, with tech behemoths Google and Amazon.com scaling up their presence in the market to take on established players like Microsoft and Tableau.
“The deal is transformative for the software industry, the most dramatic move yet by a cloud major to boost its analytics offerings,” Wedbush Securities analyst Steve Koenig said.
Salesforce’s customer relationship management software will benefit from using Tableau’s large data analytics in unraveling hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends and customer preferences, says Reuters report.
Tableau’s software is used to create interactive, visual dashboards and graphics used by businesses, universities and governments to analyse data ranging from corporate finances to baseball statistics.
Salesforce’s biggest deal ever comes days after Google bought big-data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion. It surpasses the $5.9 billion that Salesforce paid to buy U.S. software maker MuleSoft in 2018.
In 2016, Reuters had reported here that Seattle-based Tableau was one of the companies in a leaked list of potential acquisition targets for Salesforce and that Tableau was working with an investment bank to explore a sale.
Tableau has more than 86,000 customers, including tech heavyweights such as Verizon Communicationsand Netflix.
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