Eventually, Salesforce may move their analytics and reporting to the cloud and offer a solution that can work with data across the board and not just their own datasets. Customers always appreciate well integrated solutions and the benefits will be even greater for those companies moving their infrastructure to the cloud. Many companies are using Salesforce already and will benefit from a tighter integration.

Tableau has also captured the attention of marketing and sales departments in many companies worldwide. While dashboards are great, I think that the flexibility of simpler, open-source tools is beginning to win out among developers like myself. For those willing to spend a little time learning how to program with these tools, they can provide a powerful alternative worth exploring. If they can tightly integrate these acquisitions, that may help to consolidate usage among existing clients who previously worked with tools from multiple companies.Īs I look at these acquisitions, however, I think it’s worth noting another interesting trend. So what comes next? Will these tools be easy to integrate and actually make the product suites offered by Salesforce and Google Cloud more attractive to folks like me? Personally, I see them as defensive moves, a strategy to protect incumbent product portfolios by snapping up fast growing competitors. From sales, to revenue operations, to customer support, teams are recognizing the value of collecting and analyzing internal data. So why did Salesforce and Google make these big acquisitions? The most obvious answer is that working with data is increasingly happening across multiple departments, and many employees who are not well versed in programming or statistics are turning to these dashboards to help them understand data and share those insights. Both of the recently purchased companies focused on offering cloud based BI tools, a space I am quite familiar with, having spent one year rebooting a major Salesforce project for 500 users and the last two-and-half years as an analytics manager at TE Connectivity serving about 600 internal users. Recently we saw two major deals take place in the business intelligence space: Google paid $2.6 billion to acquire Looker and Salesforce ponied up a whopping $15.7 billion for Tableau. If you have an idea and would like to submit a pitch, you can email Our first piece comes from Alessio Civitillo, an Analytics Manager at TE Connectivity in Munich.

So starting this week, we will begin highlighting articles written by your peers.

The most popular response was “tech articles written by other developers.” In our 2019 Dev Survey, we asked what kind of content Stack Overflow users would like to see beyond questions and answers.

Salesforce bi tools