At its annual conference in New Orleans, Tableau Software announced its product roadmap featuring “Ask Data,” which leverages natural language processing to enable people to ask questions in an intuitive, conversational manner that makes it easier for far more people to engage with data and produce analytical insights.
Tableau’s new Ask Data allows people to ask questions in plain language and instantly get a response. Tableau will return an interactive visualization with no need to learn data dimensions, measures, or any data structure. According to Tableau, Ask Data uses sophisticated algorithms that are driven by an understanding of the person’s intent, not keywords, which helps Tableau understand a person’s question, anticipate needs, and allow for smart visualization selection.
Fully integrated into the Tableau platform in Tableau Server and Tableau Online, Ask Data works with existing published data sources and requires no additional setup. People can start exploring data already published by simply typing their question, making analytics accessible to a broader group of people regardless of their data skills. Ask Data works with an organization’s governance requirements by leveraging existing permissions and security policies defined by IT. It is available immediately in beta for Tableau Creators and Tableau Explorers at http://tableau.com/coming-soon.
“Our customers want to enable more people than ever to use analytics within their organizations, and they are looking for more intuitive and natural ways to interact with data.” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. “Ask Data, our new integrated natural language capability, lowers the barrier to entry for analytics so people can ask questions in plain language and get insights faster. And with the growing volume and complexity of data, customers want to ensure that their data is always up to date and can be trusted for decision making. So, with Tableau Prep Conductor and our new data modeling capabilities, Tableau makes managing data easier than ever.”
New Capabilities
Data Prep -- The Tableau 2019.1 beta also introduces Tableau Prep Conductor, which enables data preparation at scale by centralizing the administration, scheduling, and monitoring of data prep flows in a reliable and scalable environment. Tableau Prep Conductor is a separately licensed add-on product to Tableau Online and Tableau Server. This new capability builds off the success of the Tableau Prep desktop application, already in use by more than 9,000 organizations. It automates flows created in Tableau Prep to ensure that clean and analysis-ready data is always available. IT departments will also gain peace of mind with increased visibility into the health of data sources via centrally managed flows and alerts. Tableau Prep Conductor is easy to manage because it is directly integrated with Tableau Server and Tableau Online. It uses the same user permissions, familiar administration views, and easy-to-use processes to publish, schedule, and share data in Tableau.
Data Modeling -- Tableau showcased upcoming data modeling capabilities to help customers more easily analyze complex data without having to learn advanced database concepts or write custom SQL code. Tableau will automatically recognize data relationships stored in databases like Oracle and SQL Server, leveraging common data warehouse standards like star and snowflake schemas. Customers can also create new relationships in the data with a simple visual drag and drop experience. With these advancements coming in 2019, Tableau will handle multiple levels of detail in a single data source, making it easy for customers to slice and dice multi-dimensional data without writing specialized calculations to control aggregations like averages and totals. And since these enhanced data sources can answer a wider variety of questions, organizations will be able to consolidate the number of distinct data sources they create and maintain.
Tableau and AWS -- Tableau and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are expanding their partnership to help customers move to a modern analytics platform in the cloud. As part of the announcement, the company launched a new Tableau Server on AWS Healthcare Quick Start to help customers deploy more quickly with the support they need to meet HIPAA regulations. The initiative expands on the existing relationship and integrations between Tableau and AWS Services including Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and more. The companies also demonstrated a new Tableau Extension for Amazon SageMaker, which provides access to the fully managed machine learning service directly from a Tableau dashboard. Tableau and AWS will work together in the field to bring these and other joint capabilities to customers.
Developer Program -- Tableau also announced the launch of the new Tableau Developer Program to help customers and ISV’s integrate, customize and extend the Tableau platform faster. Free of charge and open to all developers, members receive a Tableau Online development sandbox with documentation and sample code, as well as unique access to Tableau’s engineering team and a Developer Community Forum for support. With this new program, Tableau is giving more resources to developers so they can build powerful solutions for embedded analytics deployments, dashboard extensions, custom data connectors, data science platform integrations and rich automation of business workflows. For more information visit https://tableau.com/developer.
Customers looking to trying the new features unveiled at Tableau Conference can sign up for the Tableau 2019.1 beta program at www.tableau.com/getbeta.