Tableau Set To Take Its Channel Program To The Next Level

Business analytics software developer Tableau continues to grow at a rapid pace. As that growth continues this year, the vendor says, it is counting on its channel partners to extend its sales reach into new regions and industries and provide support for the company's growing customer ranks.

This week Tableau is holding its annual partner summit in Austin, Texas, where company executives briefed some 450 partners on plans for 2016 and handed out awards for the top-performing solution providers.

"It's been a high-energy event," said Michael Hoff, vice president of channels for the Americas, in an interview with CRN after wrapping up a presentation to the attending partners. "We have ambitious goals as a company and we believe the channel is an important part of that."

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Hoff joined Tableau in August. He came from EMC, where he worked for two years as global vice president of sales for the company's software-defined solutions in the Emerging Technologies Division. Before that, he worked at Microsoft in various capacities, the last three years as general manager of the worldwide Incubation Sales group.

Seattle-based Tableau has established itself as one of the leading next-generation business analytics software vendors in what's become a very crowded arena of business intelligence and big data software startups. Tableau, which went public in 2013, has built a customer base of some 35,000 accounts and recorded 67 percent sales growth in the first three quarters of 2015 -- it's scheduled to report fourth-quarter and year-end results Feb. 4.

"We have ambitious goals as a company and we believe the channel is an important part of that," Hoff said. In October, just before Tableau's annual customer conference in Las Vegas, the company's CFO led an all-day channel strategy session for the vendor's top executives -- a point Hoff cited as evidence of Tableau's commitment to the channel as an integral part of its sales strategy.

Tableau's roster of some 1,000 partners includes VARs and resellers, global and regional systems integrators, technology partners (primarily platform companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudera), and OEM and ISV partners who build Tableau's visual analysis software into their own products, according to Hoff.

The channel executive said Tableau continues to "aggressively" recruit new channel partners, particularly solution providers that have dedicated business analytics practices, vertical industry expertise and the right technical capabilities. "We'll continue to focus on having the right partners and the quality of our channel," Hoff said. He declined to disclose specifics about the growth of Tableau's channel partner ranks or sales, citing the publicly held company's "quiet period" before announcing its earnings.

The real emphasis now is on better enabling channel partners by expanding the resources and incentives the company provides through the company's partner program. On tap for this year are plans to add more partner managers to work with solution providers, provide more in-person and online training courses, offer more marketing resources, and expand sales lead management services for partners, Hoff said.

Also coming this year is the development of a deal-registration system for partners -- something the company currently doesn't provide. Hoff said that's being built not just to prevent conflict between partners and Tableau's direct sales force, but between channel partners as well who might find themselves competing for contracts within large enterprise customers. Hoff said some of Tableau's biggest deals in 2015 were through partners.

As Tableau's customer base continues to grow, the company is also working to better align partners with potential customers, such as focusing small, local resellers on SMB customers and larger systems integrators on enterprise customers -- and then coordinate all that with the vendor's own sales resources. "We've really ramped up collaboration between our direct sales teams and our partner management teams," Hoff said.

One of Tableau's goals at this week's conference is getting partners to work more with each other to go after large corporate business analytics contracts that may call for services and expertise that are more than any one partner can provide. "We're trying to bring together our partner ecosystem in a cohesive way," Hoff said.

Tableau sells both server and desktop versions of its software, as well as offering it through the cloud via Tableau Online. Channel partners can sell all three or host the software themselves for their customers. Partners receive a percentage of the value of the first year of customer contracts.

Startup AtScale, San Mateo, Calif., which develops technology that allows widely used business intelligence tools like Tableau to easily access data in Hadoop, this week announced a technology partner alliance with Tableau under which the two companies will jointly market their combined software. That includes providing the joint solution to customers through Tableau's partner ecosystem, said AtScale CEO David Mariani in an interview with CRN.

"Hadoop is the new data warehouse and any BI tool should work with it," Mariani said. "Tableau is really trying to get ahead of the trend here." He said Tableau's reseller and system integrator partners are deploying Tableau's visual analytics to work with Hadoop, making that channel a natural fit for AtScale.

Bedford, Mass.-based Datawatch, which markets data preparation and visualization tools, also announced a partnership with Tableau that allows Datawatch's software to support Tableau's data format. That, according to Datawatch, will help solution providers deploy customer business analytics projects faster with reusable and automated data preparation processes.

Tableau also announced its Partners of the Year awards this week. They include Interworks, North and South America VAR Partner of the Year; Slalom, North and South America Alliance Partner of the Year; FiveActs, North and South America LATAM Partner of the Year; Amazon Web Services, Global Technology Partner of the Year; Cerner Corp., North and South America OEM Partner of the Year; Infosys, North and South America GSI Partner of the Year; USEReady, North and South America Services Partner of the Year; and Interworks, Training Partner of the Year.

PUBLISHED JAN. 14, 2016