Tableau takes on Sydney

The Salesforce-owned analytics provider says COVID-19 has ramped up demand for business intelligence.

Tableau country manager Gavin Jones. Source: Supplied.

Salesforce-owned analytics platform Tableau Software is expanding its reach in Asia Pacific and Japan, launching new regions in Sydney and Tokyo as COVID-19 continues to ramp up demand for business data.

Speaking to The Australian, Tableau's Australia and New Zealand boss Gavin Jones said the launch would help reduce the distance between a customer's data and their analytics service. He said the APJ locations would reduce latency, with shorter load times for customers.

"Since we since we first launched in Australia nine years ago, we've only seen demand increase as data becomes even more important in the decision making and critical systems for organisations, and it's no more important than in times like what we've been going through recently," he said.

"What we've also seen is with pandemics like this, or really any crisis, is the opportunity to shift towards cloud computing, which can speed up what you're doing and result in cost savings, as well as give you resilience and scalability."

Software giant Salesforce acquired Tableau, which focuses on data visualisations, last year in an all-stock deal worth about $22bn.

One Australian start-up to adopt Tableau Online, the company's analytics platform fully hosted in the cloud, is task fulfilment platform Airtasker.

“Airtasker rapidly deployed Tableau Online in a cost-effective way, with little internal engineering support, highlighting the ideal pace and seamlessness our suppliers need to model," said Dan Gooden, Data Lead, Airtasker.

"Tableau's flexibility and ease of data exploration have enabled Airtasker to make sense of our data in a way that was previously not possible. We make more data-informed decisions as a result."

Mr Jones added that Tableau had stepped up to support the Western Australian Department of Health and New South Wales Health, which have both used Tableau to provide them with COVID-19 analytics.

"The New South Wales government and Department of Health called us up, and we've been assisting them with data relating to the COVID-19 spread and recovery rates, coupled with monitoring of over nine different key metrics to ministers and key executives," he said.

"Those sort of use cases, it's gratifying to assist the community as well as the private enterprises in the way they responded."