Tableau Software, Based in Seattle, Washington, Helps Customers Answer Questions About

Windows Azure DataMarket Customer Solution Case Study

Software Developer Delivers Valuable Service with Easy-to-Integrate Data Marketplace

Overview “[Windows Azure] DataMarket provides data sets that Country or Region: United States deliver incredible value to our customers. Data as a service Industry: Software engineering is something we could not do before without DataMarket.” Customer Profile Based in Seattle, Washington, Tableau Ellie Fields, Director of Product Marketing, Tableau Software Software delivers software to help customers transform, visualize, and better understand business data. The Tableau Software gives its customers a way to transform their company has 195 employees. business data from text into rich visualizations and business

Business Situation intelligence. Previously, customers connected from Tableau Tableau saw an opportunity to help software only to internal data sources. If customers wanted to customers find, subscribe to, and analyze selected data as a service directly from its use public data in analyses, they had to find and format that core rapid-fire business intelligence data on their own—a time-consuming process. Tableau saw an products. opportunity to deliver data as a service, but did not want to Solution change its business and become a data provider. Instead, By using the DataMarket application programming interface, Tableau added Tableau chose to add access to DataMarket, the premium data access to the premium content available service component of the Windows Azure Marketplace, to the in DataMarket to its products with minimal effort. Tableau products—giving customers an easy way to connect to external data that augments business data. As a result, Tableau Benefits Gained simplified, programmatic access gained simple programmatic access to a data marketplace, to data service added a valuable customer service with minimal effort, and Delivered value-added customer service Maintained focus on core business maintained focus on its core business. Situation even richer business intelligence. “As an Tableau Software, based in Seattle, example, a customer may want to combine Washington, helps customers answer sales data for a particular postal code with questions about data. The company’s population data for that same postal code proprietary technology enables users to to see what kind of saturation the business drag and drop data from data sources and has in that area,” explains Ellie Fields, quickly produce rich visualizations that lead Director of Product Marketing at Tableau to valuable business intelligence. Tableau Software. calls it “rapid-fire business intelligence.” Though Tableau wants to continually Tableau serves tens of thousands of improve its services and offer value-added customers in nearly every industry, from capabilities for its customers to gather, Fortune 500 companies to self-employed visualize, and analyze data, it does not want consultants. Anyone with an interest in to change its business model and become business intelligence can benefit from using a data provider. “It’s a fine line—we want to Tableau software. The company has three deliver valuable services, but we don’t want products: a desktop application that to take our focus away from what we do provides the drag-and-drop functionality best, which is building business intelligence for data visualization; a server-based software,” says Fields. product that gives users the ability to share their results online, such as on a Microsoft At the same time, external data can be SharePoint site or wiki on a corporate difficult to find and time-consuming to network; and a cloud-based version of the purchase—often requiring companies to server product that enables customers, create purchase orders and follow other such as journalists, to make their data lengthy processes. When companies do publicly available. find the information that they’re looking for, it is often unstructured data in a variety With one click, a customer can connect to a of formats. It can take hours of research to data source—such as a Microsoft SQL find data and then up to five hours to Server database or Excel spreadsheet—and reformat that data into usable information. pull data into the Tableau application for “It’s like the Wild West of data—data is analysis. The company’s products are quick everywhere and in every format that you to deploy and let the end user ask and can possibly imagine,” explains Fields. “We answer their own questions—a key recognize that it can be a time-consuming differentiator among industry competitors. process for our customers to get their hands on the data that they want.” Tableau recognized a trend toward proliferation of data. In addition to Solution analyzing the data sets that customers own, After the release of version 5.0 of the such as corporate sales information, Tableau product line in May 2010, the customers want to augment their data with company held a three-day “hackathon.” other data, such as U.S. Census Bureau With every major release, the company information, and combine that data for allows its developers to program for the

25 products without direction or restriction, directly into Tableau, a process that uses and often the next great product feature is the Open Data (OData) protocol. Once created. During the May hackathon, one customers have data from DataMarket, developer coded basic integration to they can combine that information with DataMarket. Part of the Windows Azure their own corporate data for deep business Marketplace, DataMarket enables people to intelligence. easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions. The In September 2010, Tableau started testing information marketplace brings data, the feature in a beta release with hundreds imagery, and real-time web services from of customers. The company released leading commercial data providers and DataMarket access to all of its customers authoritative public data sources together with the Tableau 6.0 product release in into a single location, under a unified November 2010. In addition, Tableau plans provisioning and billing framework. to continue adding new capabilities with DataMarket beyond connecting to and Impressed with the premium content that authenticating data sets. For instance, the DataMarket provides, Tableau decided to company is exploring options for improved include DataMarket as a data source option browsing and filtering capabilities. in its products. By doing so, Tableau would enable its customers to easily access Benefits additional content to augment corporate By choosing to integrate with DataMarket, data. After defining the scope of the Tableau Software gained simple, project, developers integrated DataMarket programmatic access to premium data with the Tableau products in one day using offered by content providers and included existing tools, such as the Microsoft Visual the valuable service in its products, giving Studio 2010 Professional development its customers data as a service. Tableau system, and the DataMarket application delivered the capability for customers to programming interface (API), which is find, access, and analyze data sets to based on HTTP authentication standards augment their existing business data— and a Representational State Transfer enabling rich data visualization and rich (REST) interface. business intelligence—all while maintaining focus on its core business. When using Tableau software, customers see DataMarket as a data source option, Simplified Programmatic Access to Data along with other data sources such as Service Microsoft Access, Excel spreadsheet By using the DataMarket API and familiar software, and SQL Server database Visual Studio tools to generate service management software (see Figure 1). After references, developers at Tableau quickly choosing DataMarket, customers provide and easily added access to the premium their DataMarket account key for content available in DataMarket to the authentication and then search and find the Tableau products. The API is based on open data sets that they want. Customers then protocol and industry standards that make import the structured, formatted data it easy to consume the data sets in the

35 format that Tableau needs. “The Not only was Tableau able to deliver value- DataMarket API is based on standards like added services to its customers, but it did HTTP authentication and REST, which made so while maintaining sharp focus on its core integration very straightforward,” explains business. “We are not in the business of Andrew Beers, Vice President of providing data and that’s not a market we Development at Tableau Software. “We want to get into,” explains Fields. “However, didn’t have to puzzle through complicated DataMarket gives us a way to meet our APIs and could focus our technical customers’ needs without changing our resources on making the integration very business model, adding a new line of polished.” business, or drawing our focus away from what we do best—building business Created New, Value-Added Service intelligence software.” Prior to the company adding DataMarket access to Tableau products, customers could connect to many types of their own data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, and Microsoft Excel, but did not connect to any information marketplace. Now, customers can connect to DataMarket, find premium content, such as U.S. Census Bureau data, and easily import that information into Tableau for visualization. “DataMarket provides data sets that deliver incredible value to our customers,” says Fields. “Data as a service is something we could not do before without DataMarket.”

By using DataMarket, Tableau customers can tame data that exists unstructured in other locations. Previously, customers could possibly find the publicly available data that they needed, but the process was time- consuming and the data often required additional formatting. “DataMarket offers a central place to connect to a myriad of data sources and find structured data that is easy to work with,” says Fields. “It takes the friction out of any analysis or business intelligence that customers are doing.”

Maintained Focus on Core Business

45 Windows Azure Platform The Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include:

Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on- demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.  Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure offers the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.  Windows Azure AppFabric. With Windows Azure AppFabric, developers can build and manage applications more easily both on-premises and in the cloud. − AppFabric Service Bus connects services and applications across network boundaries to help developers build distributed applications. − AppFabric Access Control provides federated, claims-based access control for REST web services.  Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. Developers and information workers can use the new service DataMarket to easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.

To learn more, visit: https://datamarket.azure.com