Filed by Tableau Software, Inc.
Pursuant to Rule 425
under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended
and deemed filed pursuant to Rule14d-9
under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended
Subject Company: Tableau Software, Inc.
(Commission FileNo. 001-35925)
The following news article by Computerworld published on July 8, 2019 is being filed in connection with the acquisition of Tableau Software, Inc. by salesforce.com, inc.
Sander Almekinders
July 8, 2019
Data analytics on the eve of fundamental change
Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky: “Even though we already have the best platform, there is still a lot to be gained.”
During the Tableau Conference Europe we had the exclusive opportunity to talk in depth with the CEO of the company, Adam Selipsky. Of course we talked about the takeover by Salesforce, but also about saving the world from malaria and the love that Tableau certainly has for IT.
Even though a takeover of Tableau by Salesforce is always a surprise for those who were not present during the negotiations, it is certainly not a big surprise. On the contrary, the combination of the two parties is actually quite logical. The fact that the amount that Salesforce puts on the table is so high (almost 16 billion for a company that does not yet have a billion sales and was valued at about 10 billion), also indicates that Salesforce considers the acquisition to be of high value.
By the way, do you want to know what Salesforce gets for that 16 billion? Then don’t forget to read our previous article about Tableau, in which we discuss the company’s vision in detail. Click here to read that article.
Shared interests
In short, it was very important to Salesforce to take over Tableau. We will probably never know the exact motivation, but the general ambitions of Salesforce itself will of course have played an important role in this. It’s no secret that the company wants to be much more than a CRM company, even though that’s still where the money is made.
The acquisition of Tableau could be seen as a logicalfollow-up to the acquisition of Mulesoft last year and the further development of Customer 360 (see this article for more information). Mulesoft allows you to quickly connect new data sources. More data sources also leads to a greater need for analysis, something that Salesforce itself is not nearly as far advanced as Tableau. If Salesforce wants to play a role in ‘big data’ in general, it needs the right tools to do so. Tableau, as one of the hippest data analytics platforms of the moment, is not surprisingly a target for acquisition.
For Tableau, the much larger scale of Salesforce (more than 10 times larger) offers the advantages that come with it. “We are now getting a much larger footprint, but we also have access to many more resources, for example in the field of marketing, in order to be able to grow faster,” says Selipsky.
At Tableau, they are not afraid that they will become part of a battle between Salesforce and some of their competitors, such as Oracle. That company now seems to be focusing more on data visualization, an area in which for a long time it seemed to have almost no interest. However, Selipsky does not take such a scenario very seriously. Specifically about Oracle, he asks a rhetorical question as an answer: “With what product do they think they will do this?”