Salesforce is acquiring data analytics and visualization platform Tableau for a whopping $15.7 billion in an all-stock transaction.
The acquisition follows Google’s purchase of the analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion last week and shows that the industry is willing to pay huge sums for effective data analytics.
“2019 is close to becoming a watershed moment in the analytics industry. Every cloud provider is trying to have a local and big data analytics offering,” said Amir Orad, the CEO of Sisense which recently merged with Periscope Data.
Each share of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock will be exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock, representing an enterprise value of $15.7 billion (net of cash), according to a post by Salesforce.
“Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers. It’s truly the best of both worlds for our customers–bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce.
With the acquisition Salesforce will be able to integrate Tableau’s data visualization and analytics capabilities into its intelligent view service, Customer 360 and AI for CRM service, Einstein.
Tableau will still operate independently under the Tableau brand and will remain headquartered in Seattle, Washington with current CEO Adam Selipsky at the helm.
According to an IDC report from last year, worldwide spending on technologies and services that will enable digital transformation to reach $1.8 trillion in 2022.
“Data is the new oil, and data analytics is the way to drill, extract, and refine it, and we’re seeing wars for the oil now. Like Google’s acquisition last week, Salesforce’s acquisition here reduces the ability to work across various clouds, and only increases the importance of open platforms that can work in multi-cloud environments,” Orad said.
