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Tableau Software, which has been riding the big data wave with its on-site visual analytics software, has rejiggered its main product into a cloud service.
Tableau Online, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of Tableau Server that launched July 18, enables users to share, author and edit dashboards and reports with their company, customers and partners on-demand without needing IT support or specially trained programmers.
Using Tableau Online business intelligence in the cloud furnished by dashboards and advanced visual analytics, Seattle-based Tableau said users will be able to do the following:
—Quick startup: Because Tableau Online is real-time cloud analytics, there is no server software, nothing to provision and nothing to manage.
—Share dashboards: Users can publish dashboards to Tableau Online with a few clicks and invite others to the site to view and interact with them. A hosted service is particularly useful when sharing dashboards with customers and partners because the platform is secure, yet still outside a company’s firewall.
—Edit data anywhere: Users can get dashboards using any Web browser, iPad or Android tablet. It is automatically touch-optimized for mobile experiences; no download is required.
—Centralize data: Tableau’s Data Server provides a central place to manage data and metadata. Users can publish and share dashboards, and others can access that data to create their own analysis. This lets people benefit from work that’s already been done to prepare and publish the data.
—Update automatically: Tableau Online can automatically refresh data so users are always working with the latest versions. Data can be pulled from cloud data sources such as Salesforce.com and Google Analytics, or pushed from inside a firewall to Tableau Online.
—Subscribe: Users get critical information sent into their email inboxes by subscribing to a workbook. They simply click into the email to go to Tableau Online and interact with the data.
—Start small and grow: Tableau Online has no minimum number of users and can scale as a company grows. At any point, a company can migrate to Tableau Server to manage it in-house.
Tableau Online connects live to more than 150 sources, including partner clouds such as Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. Tableau Online already integrates with several other Tableau partners, such as Alteryx for Visual Analytics and SnapLogic.
For a free trial of Tableau Online, go here.