On Monday morning, the tech world got shaken up when Salesforce announced they had acquired data visualization software, Tableau for a whopping $15.7 billion. “We are bringing together the world’s #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform. Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers,” co-CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff said in a statement after the announcement. What started off as strictly a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, it’s clear that Salesforce is looking to expand their influence to other industries such as data analysis – creating a product that has everything a company needs all in one software.

Tableau’s 11^th Annual Conference concluded another successful conference at the end of October in New Orleans. Attendees got to attend data inspired break-out sessions, Tableau training, as well as networking events. One of the main events was the Iron Viz Championship – a competition between three finalists armed with a dataset and tasked with making the best visualization. Did I mention it was all in front of a live audience? I got to talk to 2018’s Iron Viz Champion, Timothy Vermeiren and asked him more about the championship and why he thinks data visualization is so important.

On October 22^nd, 17,000 data analysts, data scientists, and developers descended on New Orleans for good music, delicious food and Tableau’s 11^th annual conference. For the past 10 years Tableau has put together a data conference that brings together the Big Data community for four days of training, workshops, and networking.

The world of analytics is changing.  Self-Service Analytical tools like Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are enabling business users to perform reporting and analytics on their own with little to no support from the IT organization. This trend has evolved due to several factors including: