Business Analytics in Fortune Magazine – Pat Hanrahan, Tableau Co-founder

Hanrahan imgA nice article on Tableau and visual analytics appeared in Fortune magazine this week.

“Former Pixar engineer Pat Hanrahan has found a new calling organizing and analyzing business data, and bringing the information to life.

Mr. Incredible: Pat Hanrahan in his lab at Stanford

How many enterprise software executives can brag that they have been feted by Hollywood? At least one: Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford University professor and co-founder of Seattle-based Tableau Software, earned a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award for visual-effects technology…”

A few additional comments from Freakalytics follow.

It is indeed rare that an analysis product is both informative and addictive- Tableau has achieved this remarkable mix for regular business people, not just data geeks like me! I base this on the repeated feedback from the many people I have trained on Tableau in the past few years. Several reasons lie behind this including speed, flexibility and beauty of the results you can create in Tableau.

After reading this article a second time, I was surprised to see this did not include any links to the products listed:

Freakalytics Netflix NFLX Stock Price Growth as barsExamples from Freakalytics
http://www.Freakalytics.com/examples

More examples and the free version from Tableau
http://www.TableauSoftware.com/public

While Tableau isn’t a native app on the Mac, I have seen many people using it on the Mac with Windows running in Parallels. Most Mac people in the corporate world already have Windows installed in my experience. That is not to say that it wouldn’t be great to have it native on the Mac… Also, there is a sweet iPad app for viewing dynamic content from Tableau Server hosted analyses and dashboards.

In short, Tableau has redefined what business analytics software should look like and how it should engage the person using the data or reviewing the findings. It is akin to what Yahoo and Google did for finding information- it has put the analytic process in reach of the regular business user.


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