Tableau Releases Version 6.0 of Business Intelligence Software

Tableau Software specializing in rapid-fire business intelligence software announced the general availability of Tableau 6.0.

According to company officials the release will offer a new data engine working at high speed to support Tableau’s ease-of-use and visual analytics capabilities. Tableau 6.0 makes business intelligence solutions more flexible, enabling everyone from individuals to enterprises to rapidly access and analyze all their data to make smarter and faster business decisions.

Market research firm IDC (News - Alert) reveals that annual data generation will reach 35 zettabytes by 2020 which is enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars. This makes it necessary to deploy tools using which people can sift through data in more efficient ways without big IT projects.

This is shown by the explosive growth of business intelligence which is currently estimated as an $8 billion industry and projected to reach $12.4 billion by 2015, said IDC analysts.

In a press release, Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau Software, said, “Tableau 6.0 is filled with innovations that help people take charge of massive data, regardless of their job function or IT capacity. Our new Tableau Data Engine achieves instant query response on hundreds of millions of data rows, even on hardware as basic as a corporate laptop.”

“This integrates with our ability to ‘direct connect’ to virtually any database. No other platform allows companies to choose in-memory analytics on gigabytes of data or ‘direct connect’ to data warehouses like Teradata (News - Alert). What we have achieved with 6.0 is a computer science breakthrough,” Chabot added.

The new features added in version 6.0 of Tableau include data blending with one-click which allows users to combine multiple data sources. The data blending capabilities will change what people can do with data. What took six weeks as a data integration project will take only a drag-and-drop operation with Tableau 6.0. Data can be blended easily irrespective of storage method, which may be enterprise databases, Excel spreadsheets, text files or any combination.

Tableau’s new data engine is very fast allowing users to interactively analyze huge data volumes with instant query times. Also, it integrates seamlessly with existing corporate data warehouses and infrastructure.

Company sources added that the Tableau Data Engine is an optimized analytics database designed to speed data querying by 10 to 100 times and to overcome the limitations of existing databases. Also in case data is too large for enabling in-memory processing, the new version’s flexible architecture serves to improve data processing across all available hardware.