After Google’s acquisition of analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, Salesforce’s acquisition of the popular analytics and data visualisation platform Tableau is sweeping the tech headlines! Valued at $15.7 billion, the acquisition is yet another investment by the enterprise giant to bring in new technology and tools to enhance the ability of users to see and understand data, and unearth insights from it.

Why should I care, one might ask! Read on to find out what this acquisition means to the business world, and how it completely changes the analytics landscape – especially in the sales and marketing space.

What the acquisition means to the business world

Salesforce’s journey in the CRM space has been an incredible one. By anticipating the needs of customers and providing them with solutions they need to grow their business, it has carved a niche for itself. However, now, with data becoming the foundation of digital transformation, enterprises are looking at ways to accelerate their ability to deliver customer success by enabling a truly unified and powerful view across data.

Salesforce has Einstein as their analytics tool, with good functionality on RPA and AI (this functionality was missing in Tableau). But Einstein has been Salesforce’s best kept secret and limited only to its install base. Considering this, the users are left to wonder as to which product and functionality may get killed in future, and what risk factors they have to be wary.

If you’re wondering how the acquisition will impact your business, I feel, it all depends on how your organisation uses these platforms. If you use both platforms, you might not see any major changes, and can continue to operate in a similar manner. However, if you do not rely on either platform, it could have a bearing on your business as the deal might completely wipe out smaller, stand-alone analytics startups from the market. And if you who do not use Tableau, you stand to gain from the acquisition the most. For organisations like yours, just having a simple, user-friendly tool to discover deeper insights from everyday data is going to be a huge game-changer.

This is what Adam Selipsky, CEO of Tableau Software has to say about the acquisition: “Joining forces with Salesforce will enhance our ability to help people everywhere see and understand data. As part of the world’s #1 CRM company, Tableau’s intuitive and powerful analytics will enable millions of people to discover actionable insights across their entire organisation”.

The impact on enterprise customer experience

Digital marketers have been struggling with data for a long time. Extracting valuable insights from data is challenging, and marketers using those insights to engage with customers and drive conversions. Despite all the efforts enterprises make towards improving their analytics capabilities, not many have been able to succeed in making it easy for their users to understand data. However, an acquisition like this points to a transformational shift, which is poised to benefit everyone.

The coming together of a robust CRM platform and a powerful analytics platform is going to transform the way you see and understand data. While Salesforce has long been enabling sales and marketing teams to bridge data silos and streamline everyday tasks, Tableau’s analytics capabilities will relieve them of the heavy-lifting, allowing them to focus on the value of insights instead of being submerged in data.

The analytics possibilities for enterprise sales and marketing departments are endless. Salesforce has leading capabilities across sales, marketing, and service, and an incredible customer reach, all of whom need rich analytics capabilities and visual interfaces. With Tableau’s deep analytical capabilities, together, the companies can help your marketing teams get a holistic view of the performance of their department, interact with visualisations and dashboards, measure the impact of their marketing initiatives, and engage with customers in more meaningful ways.

What the future beholds

The analytics landscape is flourishing right now — if you want to make the right business decisions, you have to harness the power of data and unearth insights from it. The right use of analytics can help you get a 360-degree view of your business, customers, interactions, and sales information and use it to drive data-driven decisions.

The acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce is a direct indicator of a future that will be built on analytics to drive productivity, growth, revenue, and value. There are also other analytics tools like Rubics, Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning etc. which are upping their game. Keeping pace with the constantly changing trends requires companies to look for options that can help them meet the benchmark set by Tableau.

While it is a known fact that Salesforce deeply understands customers, and Tableau deeply understands data, only time will tell if this lethal combination will work, or if it will go the other typical acquisitions way. For now, let’s just wait and watch!