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1
IBM BA Competitive Team Cheat Sheet: Competing against Tableau
Last Updated: Feb 2014
BI Solution Summary
Tableau Software is a public company (went IPO in
May 2013, trading on NYSE as DATA), founded
in 2003, and headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA.
They have roughly 1212 employees in 2013. The
company is growing quickly (~82% YOY growth in
2013). Rooted in academic research the company
adapted visualization techniques for exploring and
analyzing relational databases and data cubes. The
company has expanded in NA with strong
penetration in the US market and is also focusing on
Europe, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, and ASEAN
countries (adding additional language support for
Spanish and Portuguese along with French, German
and Japanese). They are still pursuing a horizontal
platform strategy and are embarking on a vertical
industry specific strategy to include healthcare;
retail; financial services; government, education,
insurance, manufacturing and technology.
Financial results 2013 ( year)
License revenue ~$159.9
Maintenance revenue ~$72.5
Professional Services revenue ~$7.1
Total revenue ~$232.4 M
Tableau positions themselves as a data discovery /
visualization vendor complimentary to traditional BI
systems focusing their value proposition on
dashboards with emphasis on low cost of entry,
speed of data load and implementation, leveraging
their broad data support capability to join data.
Recent enhancements have expanded to include in-
memory and self-service features accelerating big
data analysis. The following table identifies their
current products. In all instances, the users
requires Tableau Desktop to author and change
reports and publish to Tableau Server whereby
users can interact with the output by interacting
with prompts, graphs, and other objects. Tableau
Server also enables the distribution of reports via
mobile including iOS and Android. Tableau released
Tableau Online SaaS hosted version of Tableau
Server in July 2013.

Products Description
Tableau Desktop A data visualization application that analyzes
structured data and produces dashboards and
reports using a drag and drop interface.
Tableau Server Enables browser-based visual analytics created
with Tableau Desktop as well as access to
authored content via mobile devices
Tableau Digital A premium version of Tableau Public. A service
solution for media, government and public-private
organizations that want to enhance their public
websites.
Tableau Public A free download to provide data visualization to the
web with publically accessible data
Tableau Online SaaS Offering.
Tableau Reader Free. Read only for existing dashboards
Latest version is Tableau 8.1 (Nov 2013).

IBM / Tableau Comparative Solutions
Note: for IBM Cognos 10 product family here are
the abbreviations used in the table that follows:
CE IBM Cognos Enterprise
CX IBM Cognos Express
CI IBM Cognos Insight
CM IBM Cognos Mobile
CW/CWA Cognos Workspace / Advanced
N/A means the capabilities is not offered or it is not
a good fit. In bold are Tableaus lead agendas.

Capability Tableau IBM
Reporting Tableau Desktop /
Server / No pixel-perfect
reporting.
CE: Report Studio
CX: Express Reporter
CI: N/A for production or
batch reports
Ad Hoc
Queries
Nothing out of the box. CE: CWA, + Cognos
Analysis for Excel
CX: Reporter, Xcelerator
CI: Yes (in-memory
analysis)
Analysis Tableau Desktop /
Server for distribution,
scheduling & mobile.

CE: CW / CWA / AS
CX: Advisor/Xcelerator
CI: Yes (personal
analysis)
Dashboards Tableau Desktop /
Server
CE: CW, Active Report
(offline), Report Studio
Capability Tableau IBM
CX: Advisor
CI: Yes
Discovery /
Visualization
Tableau Desktop /
Server
CE: CW (visualization),
CWA (discovery), + Cog
Analysis for Excel
CX: Advisor
CI: Neutralize with CI
Data Mining /
Predictive
Some statistical
functions supported but
not in-depth as SPSS for
stats/predictive
SPSS STATS & Modeler
Data
Integration /
ETL
N/A - The responsibility
is on the end user to do
this.
Options: TM1, Data
Manager, InfoSphere
DataStage, etc
IBM leadership
Data Cleansing N/A InfoSphere QualityStage
IBM leadership
Real Time
Monitoring
N/A CE: Cognos RTM
CX: N/A
CI: N/A
Scorecarding
& Strategy
Management
N/A

CE: Metric Studio
CX: Advisor
CI: Analytics / SPSS
Mobile Tableau Server CE: Cognos Mobile
(Active Report, RAVE)
CX: Cognos Mobile on
iPad only
CI: N/A
PM (planning,
budgeting,
forecasting)
N/A

CE: TM1
CX: Planner
CI: Yes (distributed
contribution)
Consolidation N/A CE: Cognos Controller
(or TM1) + Cognos FSR
SaaS Tableau Online
(SaaS)
Tableau Public /
Digital No
subscription model.
IBM SmartCloud (SaaS)
SPSS Decision
Management SaaS

Tableau Strategy against IBM
Tableau positions Tableau 8 as complimentary
technology with the ability to create ordinary
reports, data visualizations and dashboards
without any programming or coding.

IBM internal and Cognos Business Partner use only
2
IBM BA Competitive Team Cheat Sheet: Competing against Tableau
Last Updated: Feb 2014
Focuses on the business user who is not being
served with their current BI solution and highlights
how Tableau supports self-service BI, maps,
automatic time dimension and integration with
other platforms (e.g. Big data, SAP HANA, Attivio)
Positions traditional BI platforms as architecture
heavy, extremely complicated and expensive
suggesting all of them are too complex to
implement for business centric users.
Tableau promotes themselves as a vendor for
consumerization of enterprise software. They
are flexible, fast to implement and an affordable
cost alternative.
Promoting IT Administrative self-service features.
Performance and scalability such as local rendering
secure shared sessions for user scale.
Performance recorder SQL Profiler similarities
can customize the views.
Deficient in core business intelligence and
analytical capabilities Tableau uses analyst reports
more frequently: e.g. Gartner Magic Quadrant for
BI Platform (where they are leader as well), BARC
Survey 12, Wisdom of Crowds BI Market
Survey,, to offset inherent enterprise
weaknesses. We need to leverage Industry
Analyst reports to amplify shortcomings.

Tableaus Strengths / Weaknesses

Strength Weakness
Visual /
Business
Fast time to create
analysis / dashboards.
Ability to share
visualizations
Mobile deployment
Several deployment
options
Moderate cost & fast
ROI
Broad community
Tableau Public - Free
Limited BI offering do
not have the breadth of
capabilities
Scripting/coding for
specific capabilities
Visualization alone is not
data mining
Global presence &
accessibility 8
language supported
Product
Functionality
Speed of data load and
implementation
Query performance,
smart caching
Connects to
Salesforce.com and
Google Analytics
Narrowly defined around
analysis and interactive
visualization.
Lacks broader BI
platform capabilities
production reporting
and predictive
Strength Weakness
In-memory analytics
SAP HANA, Big Data,
and other data support
analytics!
Very limited vertical
industry capabilities
No LDAP integration
No XML capabilities
Product /
User related
Product appeal:
dashboard, associative
analysis / search
Ease of use!
Speed of implementation
Departmentally deployed
Not enterprise ready;
weaker predictive, no
strategic scorecarding,
no PM.
Lacks the ability to do
multi-pass SQL
No write-back feature
Steps to get to an
impressive dashboard

Tableaus BI Challenges
1. Product is not enterprise-ready. Mainly
departmental, business user centric but are
marketing themselves with enterprise focus. Many
enterprise features still missing (no breadth of BI
such as no pixel perfect reporting, weaker predictive
analytics based on R integration, no scorecarding,
no breadth of analysis from historical to future; data
quality and data cleansing). Data must be moved to
the application and cannot reside in place.
According to Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI report,
Tableaus product functionality is more narrowly
defined around analysis and interactive
visualization. It is still less likely to be considered
as an enterprise BI standard. Lack of integration
with middleware.
2. Product is primarily a dashboard solution.
Positioned as a strong interactive visualization for
analysis, and dashboards their product suite still
lacks a lot of traditional BI (see above Comparative
Solution table) let alone the expanded BI/BA
portfolio. Ask the customer how they plan to roll out
reporting, query, analysis and then seek/drive
additional BI/AA requirements and if they want a
multi-vendor approach to solve different role
requirements which is costly and not scalable.
3. Limited to self-service BI departmental
interface. Broaden the conversation and seek out
requirements around enterprise Reporting,
Scorecarding, Planning, Predictive, driving what-if
scenarios, and how they plan to accomplish this
with only a data-visualization tool. Tableau is
insufficient at handling this level of complexity
(Reference: Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI)
4. Collaboration and small international
footprint. A significant drawback in view of
enterprise requirements. According to Forrester
Wave Self-service BI platform, Tableaus
collaborative capabilities do not exist. Furthermore,
support services are in English only.
5. Challenges associated with organic growth.
Currently lack financial capacity and technical
breadth to fund research and development activities
to innovate and have broad appeal to the enterprise
portfolio. Discuss time to market with new
functionalities, our hands on experiences with
thousands of customers to expand enterprise
platform capabilities and develop function specific
engineered systems.
6. Weaker Reporting and Complex Query
Features. Deficient in carrying out multi-pass SQL,
a common requirement for enterprises with multiple
fact tables in the data warehouse. Ask the
customer how they do tabular calculations and
report layouts as this can be cumbersome with
Tableau 8.
7. Subscriptions. Users can subscribe to a
workbook and have a view automatically e-mailed
to them on a periodic basis. Not available is the
ability to have the workbook e-mailed based on a
business event (such as low inventory) or system
event (data refresh), limiting the usefulness of this
capability.
8. Mobile. There is a native app for iPad, with
support for Android. With the native app, touch
gestures such as tap for details are supported, but
pinch to zoom is not. Users also cannot leverage the
iPad comment or share features. Filters are
converted to iPad filters however, there is currently
no offline or airplane mode, a limitation.

How to succeed against Tableau
General guidance:

IBM internal and Cognos Business Partner use only
3
IBM BA Competitive Team Cheat Sheet: Competing against Tableau
Last Updated: Feb 2014
Leverage Tableau Attack Plan (strategy against
data discovery/visualization vendors) to formulate
your winning strategy against Tableau.
Always expand agenda Focus on helping the
customer realize our vision for BA and how a strong
BI Platform can help them grow as their needs
expand, and as they grow as a business. e.g. full
spectrum of analysis (incl. what-if analysis,
predictive analytics, embedded statistics, all time
horizons from one interface, MS Office integration,
Real-time data analysis); enterprise readiness;
enterprise reporting; enterprise PM, and so on.
On mobile agendas differentiate with extensible
visualizations (limitless customizations) and
interactivity. There is currently no offline or airplane
mode, a limitation. Some of the visualization options
like Network diagram are missing.
Articulate the Cognos Family message of how they
can start and grow as their needs arise. Not locked
into a one-size-fits-all or one capability for all BI
needs. Demonstrate how products are role-based
meaning they can scale to meet the needs of the
user and grow with them as their skills increase
Compete on company attributes (viability, broad
market recognition, support, partnership) whenever
possible.
Reference analyst reports to our advantage see
resources section for reports.
Have strategic conversations around Big Data with
BI. Big Data becoming a strong focus for Tableau
they have Big data and cloud connectors and offer
support for: SAP HANA, Google Big Query, Hadoop
(Cloudera, Hortonworks Hive, MapR Hive), Microsoft
PowerPivot, (also) Salesforce.com and Google
Analytics connectors. Position our leadership in this
area and ability to create real competitive advantage
from data analysis.
Net New Deals: (Greenfield opportunities)
Recognize that they will seem very appealing to a
business user. When going up against them, we
need to neutralize this perception with our own
good-looking reports across our portfolio including
mobile. Forrester Wave Self-service BI Platform
report identifies Cognos having the broadest and
most balanced set of self-service features. A strong
platform with integration across the stack and good
visualization on the desktop, server and mobile
(refer to Figure 2 in the report).
Differentiate on IBMs resource capabilities to grow
with the business. Illustrate product breadth and
functionality against requirements. Complexity and
quality of work dictate time to deploy. Drill down on
requirements precisely and uncover actual
implementation time. Highlight IBM resources.
Persuade a business user to envision beyond a
narrow tool offering seek requirements for
extending beyond dashboards: to professional
reporting, scorecards, planning, FSR, predictive.
We need to broaden the offering, while neutralizing
the appeal of their tool to users.
Full predictive analytics life cycle capabilities
differentiates IBM from Tableau 8. A rich set of
algorithms to analyze data, architectures that can
handle big data and having the tools for data
analysts is now standard. Highlight IBM SPSS
leadership in providing predictive capabilities and
IBMs complementary solutions, such as InfoSphere
Streams and Decision Management.
Articulate the Cognos Family message of how they
can start and grow as their needs arise. Not locked
into a one-size-fits-all or one capability for all BI
needs. Demonstrate how products are role-based
meaning they can scale to meet the needs of the
user and grow with them as their skills increase
Identify any enterprise-class or global
requirements e.g. security, multi-lingual,
middleware integration, various data sources and
requirement to create a consistent view across all
data environments, integration with various
processes. Have proven enterprise readiness
conversation.
Use the various Industry Analysts reports to
highlight IBMs growing BI and AA leadership such
as the with IBM pioneering the self-service market
with CI (Forrester Wave Self-service BI Platforms,
Q2, 2012 report), Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI,
Nucleus Value Matrix.
Surround/complement:
Give up some ground not recommended.
Suggest you neutralize by articulating why Cognos
Insight for BI. We support visual analysis in both
stand-alone and as an extension of the Cognos 10
platform. Use Cognos Insight as a way to neutralize
their tool offering and identify how it is tied to the
BI platform, IT managed and governed.
Defend - Existing customers
Identify any existing IBM infrastructure: database,
middleware, hardware, software. Introduce IT
oriented client experiences around the business
requirements. Look for multilingual requirements.
Tableau offers English support only. Look for any
non-Windows opportunities.
Identify versions of Cognos, current versions,
and any perceived gaps or dissatisfaction from
clients e.g. strategic, operational. Recommend IBM
Cognos 10 family offerings against gaps.
Find out what makes Tableau appealing i.e.
speed, in-memory, look and feel, and cost?
Find and use a Cognos coach.

Traps to Set
Enterprise readiness
Position IBM as proven in the enterprise with the
ability to leverage their existing infrastructure
(broad platform support, not just Windows).
Discuss our enterprise level capabilities around
multi-tenancy, write-back capabilities and bi-
directional language support (we have a huge
advantage here). Probe need for Predictive
Analytics, Performance Management, Risk
Management and other capabilities that expand
the scope of their current project.
Discuss how will the customer manage all the
separate Tableau application files or if they plan
on deploying Tableau Desktop to all users who
need to modify/change something in a report.
Discuss how we can deliver Self-Service across
desktop and web allowing users to create and
change content tailored to their role and security
Is data quality important to you? Is there a need
for advanced data integration requirements?
Complete data interactivity?

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IBM BA Competitive Team Cheat Sheet: Competing against Tableau
Last Updated: Feb 2014
Is collaboration a strategic imperative? Are you a
diversified enterprise? Multilingual support
capabilities of IBM improve employee
collaboration; enable users to employ data from all
sources, share across boundaries and engage in
data-driven decisions.
Narrow BI focus
We find that often clients need to know what to do
next? Ask: What requirements and plans do you
have for predictive analysis, and performance
management? Promote Smarter Analytics agenda
and Solutions by Industry as well as Mobile BI to
specifically address clients future needs.
Tableaus tool does not fully leverage the native
capabilities to augment the user experience on the
mobile device. Therefore, the resulting BI content
can seem limited, with few exploration or
customization possibilities.
What are your currents reporting needs? Do you
have a requirement to generate pixel perfect
reports? Reports that run on a schedule, ad-hoc
analysis, or the ability to perform scenario (what-
if) analysis?
Are you prepared to train your users on a
proprietary scripting language, in addition to SQL?
What will you do to address other BI requirements
as they come up as well as enabling all users to be
able to access trusted information?

Traps to Avoid
Going head to head on the good looking graphics
they have an edge here. Neutralize with
AnalyticsZone CI content, IBM Many Eyes, and focus
on the business value of our platform, all types of BI
needs and expand with broadening the agenda,
while neutralizing their offering.
Author once, for both web and mobile Both
Cognos and Tableau can deliver this experience,
with Active Report, users get the additional benefit
of taking information offline. Dont let them lead
this agenda but rather neutralize and showcase the
offline / mobile strategy we employ disconnected,
iPad, and inside Microsoft Office.

Objection handling
Tableau implementations (according to BARC
analysts, also BARC Survey 12) are much quicker due
in part to not relying on a data warehouse however
they actually do require you to build your own data
repository in order to answer the questions within
the reports.
Tableau offers a skewed version of predictive
analytics/modeling; only recently they included
integration with R for some predictive capabilities;
IBM (SPSS) is the leader in the space. Our breadth
of products can be pulled together to handle an
array of business problems without diminishing your
ability to conceive, create and share compelling
visualizations for accurate decision making.
Cognos BI is not completely 64 bit This shouldnt
matter since we support a broad set of OS and
database technologies. We do have 64-bit
components in the query and engine layers.
Tableau 8 is not that expensive If the
opportunity is price-sensitive or price is thought to
be a real barrier, consider positioning Cognos
Insight / Express to minimize cost and identify the
value of the customer having a complete BI&PM
platform. Point out that with Cognos, customers can
grow and with Tableau you will hit the wall.
Cognos is too complex for most users We are a
solution that grows with the users own analytics
quotient from personal analysis, workgroup, to
enterprise - with no need to upgrade to brand-new
technology, because it is all built on the same
foundation. With a graduated user-interface, users
have the right interface to enable them to work
efficiently and access the information they need.
Data integration with IBM you do not hit the
enterprise wall when you grow beyond a small
departmental or localized deployment.

Elevator Pitch
IBM offers full breadth of BA capabilities for
your current and future requirements, thus:
solution that grows with the business;
standardization opportunity; one vendor approach
versus always having to partner for basic
capabilities; broadest set of capabilities for both
business and IT (BI, Predictive and Advanced
Analytics, Financial Performance & Strategy
Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance,
Analytic Applications). Proof: Gartner MQ for BI
Platforms (IBM has the highest score on Vision)
IBM provides a complete enterprise solution
on a single platform and IBM Cognos 10 is fully
integrated with SPSS (leader in Data Mining /
Predictive Analytics on Gartners MQ where
Tableau is not listed). Quality of BI is directly
dependent upon the quality of data integration our
technology merges, extracts, transforms and
manages data in a dimensional environment making
it easy to understand.
From one vendor and one location (Unified
Workspace) you can see the whole of your
business, across all dimensions, and across All
Time Horizons (past, present, future), as well
as you can search for relevant information or initiate
planning activities, perform on the fly what-if
analysis and deep predictive analytics. Unified
Workspace offers self-service assembly of the
workspace, built-in collaboration, and full spectrum
analysis. Market leading technology in seven of nine
BI categories and overall leader in customer
satisfaction (Ovum Decision Matrix for BI
2011/2012)

Pricing Strategy and Guidance
Price list publically available (single unit pricing,
volume discounting and taxes not available):
https://tableau.secure.force.com/webstore

Tableau 8.0 Client Desktop License Pricing:
Personal Desktop Edition
(individual use only)
Free
Named user license $999 per named user
Professional license $1,999 per named user
Student Desktop Professional $69.00 / $99.00
Tableau 8.0 Server License Pricing:
Server Interactor $1000 per named user
Maintenance and support: N/A
Pricing model: N/A
Discount: discount info not available


IBM internal and Cognos Business Partner use only
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IBM BA Competitive Team Cheat Sheet: Competing against Tableau
Last Updated: Feb 2014
References and Resources
OVUM... Tableau now needs to sharpen its focus on the
enterprise. Although its product is increasingly prevalent in
numerous large enterprises in North America and Europe, many
deployments are restricted to isolated departments or
workgroups. This is not because it is a poorly conceived product,
but instead is a reflection of a typical maturity curve for BI
adoption in enterprises. Tableau is an ideal tool for personalized,
self-service data visualizations and analytics. What it lacks,
however, are the robust enterprise-ready capabilities found in
more mature (in terms of technology and adoption) BI tools such
as enterprise reporting and OLAP.

How Tableau 8 looks like?

Tableau 8 dashboard example:



Tableau 8 dashboard (positioning): interactive, point & click, easy
to learn, mouse over, lasso effect, sliders (what-if), color coded
toggle, zooming, extensible, drilling, prompts , small real-state,
same across multiple tabs, build-in scrolling, dynamically change
dimensions, associative search, animations, collaborative
sessions, annotations, bookmarks
Tableau 8 on mobile:





Tableau 8 Server: They position automatic failover with little
or no impact to the users; not completely accurate you will
experience some downtime.