Tableau eyes more enterprise business with new features, subscription plans | ZDNet

Tableau on Thursday rolled out a series of new enterprise-driven features to its platform, including capabilities to help scale the use of analytics across an organization. The Salesforce-owned business is also adding new enterprise subscription plans, with an eye towards broadening its appeal beyond individual users. 

“Tableau has long been a favorite to help individuals see and understand data,” Tableau Chief Product Officer Francois Ajenstat said in a statement. “We’re making it easier for IT leaders to make it a favorite across the entire enterprise and deliver an end-to-end solution to leverage the full power of data analytics.”

To scale the use of analytics, the updated Tableau platform will offer a few new tools. The new Enterprise Deployment Guidelines (EDG) provides a reference architecture for enterprise customers to help them meet requirements around availability, scalability and security. It’s technology agnostic, platform independent and aligned with enterprise data center best practices.

Additionally, the new dynamic scaling feature helps enterprises ensure enough containers are available during peak demand times while allowing them to scale down during low demand times. A new resource management feature helps IT teams optimize the performance of Tableau Server by defining application resource limits.

The upcoming features also include data management and governance capabilities. Tableau Prep Conductor will help users fill gaps in data to ensure more complete data sets and accurate visualizations. The updates will also help customers automatically reduce loads and the costs of server resources. 

For improved security, Tableau administrators will be able to centrally configure which users and groups have access to which slices of data. Additionally, users will be able to get data quality warnings alerting them of potential issues.

As far as subscription plans go, Tableau is bundling different licenses — Creator, Explorer and Viewer licenses — with Data Management, as well as Data Management plus Server Management. 

“We recognize your need for deep and broad capabilities to help your whole organization succeed at scale, regardless of an individual’s skill level or relationship with data,”  Tableau VP of Product Marketing Loreal Lynch put it in a blog post.