Tableau and Salesforce revealed three new tools that infuse Tableau CRM's analytics capabilities into Salesforce.
Salesforce on Wednesday unveiled Revenue Intelligence, CDP Direct Data and Tableau CRM for Net Zero Cloud as part of its Spring '22 Release, and each brings enhanced analytics functionality to Salesforce tools using Tableau.
Salesforce, a CRM and customer experience giant founded in 1999 and based in San Francisco, acquired Tableau, founded in 2003 and based in Seattle, in June 2019 for $15.7 billion.
Integrations were slow to materialize at first, but in March 2021 -- nearly two years after the acquisition was first unveiled -- Tableau's spring platform update included the addition of Einstein Discovery, a no-code tool within Salesforce's Einstein Analytics platform that enables predictive modeling and prescriptive recommendations by using augmented intelligence and machine learning.
In advance of the initial integration, in October 2020, Salesforce and Tableau revealed that the entire Einstein Analytics platform was being rebranded as Tableau CRM and would be managed by Tableau rather than Salesforce going forward.
Since then, integrations have included Ask Data for Salesforce, a tool that enables natural language query, and a series of Tableau tools for Slack, which Salesforce acquired for $27.7 billion in December 2020.
All three of these announcements … bring new analytical functionality to Salesforce customers using Tableau CRM. This set of announcements is a good sign for any customer who invested in Einstein Analytics that the investment continues in Tableau CRM.
Doug HenschenAnalyst, Constellation Research
Revenue Intelligence, CDP Direct Data and Tableau CRM for Net Zero Cloud will each bring the augmented analytics capabilities of Tableau CRM to Salesforce's CRM tools to the benefit of Salesforce customers, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
"All three of these announcements … bring new analytical functionality to Salesforce customers using Tableau CRM," he said. "This set of announcements is a good sign for any customer who invested in Einstein Analytics that the investment continues in Tableau CRM, and that it is evolving to deliver actionable insights in the context of Salesforce applications."
New capabilities
Revenue Intelligence is an extra-cost tool for Salesforce Sales Cloud that delivers insights powered by Tableau CRM to sales leaders throughout their sales and revenue workflow. The new capability eliminates the need to navigate between separate reports and dashboards and automatically delivers insights that lead to action.
CDP Direct Data natively integrates Salesforce CDP -- a repository for collecting and unifying customer data -- into Tableau CRM and enables users to directly query data stored in Salesforce CDP without moving the data. The feature enables users to accelerate data preparation without a connector or data setup, centralize control and simplify data mapping.
Finally, Tableau CRM for Net Zero Cloud utilizes Tableau to power dashboards, surface actionable insights and do scenario planning and forecasting in Salesforce's Net Zero Cloud, a tool designed specifically for analyzing carbon emissions and energy use as organizations attempt to quantify and reduce their carbon footprint.
A Tableau CRM for Net Zero Cloud dashboard displays and organization's emissions and energy consumption data.
With more organizations prioritizing environmental sustainability, Tableau CRM for Net Zero Cloud stands out as a particularly useful new capability, said Mike Leone, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
"With sustainability being top of mind for virtually all organizations, I believe tying Tableau to Salesforce's Net Zero Cloud is fantastic," he said. "Tableau will deliver a comprehensive view of all sustainability-related data … that will help with planning and forecasting in areas like carbon emissions and footprint tracking, renewable energy, traveling and audits."
Similarly, Henschen noted that Tableau CRM for Net Zero Cloud is an important addition to the Salesforce platform.
"I'm excited to see a mainstream vendor addressing emerging environmental, social and governance challenges using their existing data management and analytical capabilities," he said.
"I see Revenue Intelligence as a positive acknowledgement and response to the interest in delivering actionable insights in the context of work -- or next-generation embedding, as I call it -- rather than forcing users to navigate between transactional interfaces and separate reports and dashboards," Henschen said.
Beyond the significance of the individual capabilities, the trio of new integrations demonstrates the power of Salesforce and Tableau together, according to Leone.
Tableau has been known for spectacular data visualizations, and the three new Salesforce capabilities will benefit from that visual prowess.
"This feels like the first big integration where you can physically see the result in the [user interface] and say, 'Now that's a Tableau dashboard,' compared to some of the more simplistic charts and graphs traditional Salesforce has been delivering for years," Leone said.
Future plans
As Salesforce and Tableau continue to work together to build new capabilities, more tools like Revenue Intelligence stand to benefit users, according to Henschen.
While Revenue Intelligence is aimed at sales, opportunities exist for similar tools that address other areas of the business.
"Organizations are embracing the idea of delivering actionable analytics in the context of work, so I'd like to see more developments like Revenue Intelligence for the other Salesforce clouds, including Service, Marketing, Commerce and so on," he said.
In addition, Henschen noted that Salesforce has strong no-code and low-code application development capabilities with Salesforce Lightning, and those could benefit Tableau.
"I'd like to see more Lightning-like low-code/no-code capabilities both within Tableau CRM and within Tableau itself," he said.
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.
