It's not PowerBI they are competing with. It's Qlikview. Their biggest issue is that Qlikview is viral: you can use the evaluation version ("personal edition") for as long as you want, but it has restrictions. With Tableau, you get a 15 day trial. Consequently, it gets used in businesses for small data projects, gets seen to be really effective, then the business realises it's effective and buys licenses.
Tableau isn't SAP, it just isn't. If they want to really get into businesses, then they need to be sensible and give people the opportunity to use it and then get it into the businesses they work in.
For instance, I used Tableau to learn it for the 15 days they gave me, and I learned quite a lot as they have great documentation, but then after the 15 days I got no more opportunities to go through their tutorials. Partially I got busy on other things and wanted to revisit it after a few days, but I also setup SQL Server SSAS which took me a bit of time. I got a maximum of about 5 days usage, after that there's no point having it on my workstation as it's far too expensive for me to justify buying a copy.
If I could have had more time with the product, I guess I'd know how good it is so I can recommend it to the business I work at. Unfortunately, I can't without cracking their trial limit code, which I'm just not prepared to do. For now, I guess I'll be recommending Qlikview which is a known quantity and very good also, though nowhere near as intuitive.
This is definitely an issue. It's difficult to really sell a tool like this to your managers unless you can prove over time it saves you. With orgs I've been at the decision process was like
- order 1 license to test it out
- analyst gets order of magnitude work done more than co-workers
- team manager buys 10 licenses and a tableau server
Tableau isn't SAP, it just isn't. If they want to really get into businesses, then they need to be sensible and give people the opportunity to use it and then get it into the businesses they work in.
For instance, I used Tableau to learn it for the 15 days they gave me, and I learned quite a lot as they have great documentation, but then after the 15 days I got no more opportunities to go through their tutorials. Partially I got busy on other things and wanted to revisit it after a few days, but I also setup SQL Server SSAS which took me a bit of time. I got a maximum of about 5 days usage, after that there's no point having it on my workstation as it's far too expensive for me to justify buying a copy.
If I could have had more time with the product, I guess I'd know how good it is so I can recommend it to the business I work at. Unfortunately, I can't without cracking their trial limit code, which I'm just not prepared to do. For now, I guess I'll be recommending Qlikview which is a known quantity and very good also, though nowhere near as intuitive.