More Tableau-Salesforce integrations on the cards

Tableau and Salesforce are looking to deliver more “pre-integrated” offerings that infuse the latter’s analytics capabilities into Salesforce’s broad suite of cloud-based applications.

Speaking to Computer Weekly in Singapore, Tableau’s chief revenue officer Ryan Aytay noted that following the recent integration between Tableau CRM and Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud and Revenue Intelligence products, enterprises can expect to see more integrations with Salesforce’s Service and Marketing clouds.

“We still have that broad Tableau CRM platform which you could build for [Service Cloud], but as we go around sales, marketing and Net Zero, you’re predicting the future in a good way,” he said.

In February 2022, Tableau announced that Tableau CRM – formerly Einstein Analytics – has been integrated with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud through Revenue Intelligence, a revenue management tool that sales teams can use to gain insights on their sales and revenue cycle.

In addition, Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud that lets organisations analyse carbon emissions from energy usage and business travel now uses Tableau CRM to power dashboards, surface actionable insights and do scenario planning and forecasting in sustainability efforts.

“It’s really about listening to what our customers are asking for – Salesforce customers can start with data and end with action,” Aytay said, adding that the pandemic has also brought more data-related problems to the fore.

For example, he said businesses grappling with high employee attrition would want to know where they are hiring from, who has been onboarded, and if they have diversity in their ranks and measuring that across their organisations.

“Tableau is an amazing tool for that and that really broadens the scope for Salesforce holistically, which is really to deliver any [analytics] use case,” he said.

Take Zuellig Pharma, which provides drugs, medical supplies and services across 13 countries in Asia. The company is using Tableau to identify trends such as Covid-19 outbreaks and forecast demand for vaccines.

“Crucially, we’ve been able to identify and remove counterfeit vaccines in the supply chain to ensure the integrity of vaccines remains uncompromised,” said Daniel Laverick, vice-president and head of digital and data at Zuellig Pharma.

Laverick added that Tableau has also enabled it to gain clinical insights into a patient’s journey, enabling healthcare providers to identify specific comorbidities that result in higher risk for patients.

Just as important is the need for collaborative analytics where employees can work together on data-related questions. Aytay said that is where Slack, which Salesforce acquired in 2021 for $27.7bn, comes in.

“Imagine a world where we get to ask questions about data in other parts of Tableau – that’s really the opportunity because a lot of this data is somewhere in the business, but it’s not shared and it’s not collaborative. We want to bring that to the right people at the right time,” he said.

Aytay noted that Asia-Pacific presents a huge opportunity, not only for Tableau but for Salesforce at large, singling out markets such as Australia and Southeast Asia, as well as embedded analytics, where data analysis occurs within a user’s workflow without the need to toggle to another application.

“Embedded is a new opportunity that I’m personally excited about because many companies want to turn into a technology company, transform their business and bring analytics into their service. That’s the future where I think things are going.”