Tableau to Enter Data Prep, Real-Time Analytics Market

Where once business intelligence tools relied on static dashboards, they are now having to deal with real-time data analytics.

Perhaps no company illustrates that shift better than Tableau, a market leader in business intelligence and data discovery.  Tableau will update its software with a new data preparation product, natural language processing, and a faster in-memory data engine, the company announced Nov. 8 at its global conference.

The new data preparation product, Project Maestro, will make it possible to easily prepare, integrate and transform data with a direct, visual approach, the company stated.

“Welcome to the party Tableau,” said Dan Potter, CMO of Datawatch, a competing BI and analytics tool.

Tableau’s new HyPer data engine, which uses in-memory processing, will provide interactive analysis on data of all sizes and enable fast data ingestion for near real-time analysis. Tableau acquired HyPer, a high-performance database, in March.

The software will also include Natural Language Processing, letting users interact with data through human language, and instant analytics, a new capability that will provide contextual information to help users interact with data.

Related: How AI Systems Using NLP Work

There are also new data governance capabilities in Tableau Server to certify data sources, conduct impact analysis on sources and workbooks, and promote content and workflows with drag-and-drop gestures. Collaboration tools, in addition, include data-driven alerting.

The company is also working on Tableau Server for Linux, machine-learning recommendations for workbooks and data sources, and new hybrid data connectivity for the cloud.

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