As part of its efforts to capture a share of the US$1bn a year business intelligence market in Europe, Tableau Software is aggressively investing in its operations in Dublin, its co-founder and CEO Christian Chabot has said.
Tableau, which established its operations in Dublin two years ago, now employs 33 people and has vacancies online for 16, and is opening a new Dublin office in June at The Oval on Shelbourne Road in Ballsbridge.
Tableau Software is making a large investment in Europe, with recent growth driven by international expansion in 2014. The company has seen revenue growth of more than 100pc for the past two years in EMEA, and has grown its customers by 60pc since 2013, reaching more than 5,000 customers in EMEA in 2014 and more than doubling its employee headcount.
In the average week more than 150 organisations are becoming Tableau customers, with major customer accounts in Ireland including Vodafone Ireland, Irish Life and Trend Micro.
The business intelligence industry is a rapidly-growing sector, with spend on business intelligence and analytics in EMEA estimated to exceed US$1bn by 2018, at a growth rate of 11.06pc.
The company was started by Chabot along with his Stanford friends Chris Stolte and Pat Hanrahan.
Hanrahan, a Stanford professor who was a founding employee at Pixar and who has won three Academy Awards for his work in computer graphics for movies, set out with Chabot, an executive with a passion for data, and data scientist Stolte to put data visualisation in the hands of everyone.
A compelling vision for the future of work
“Pat and Chris had a visionary idea for a research direction. They were working at Stanford University’s department of Computer Science, the same department that spawned Google and VMware and many other great companies, and their idea was to fuse the world of computer graphics with database systems, that no one had taken up before.
“Pat has three Oscars for his work in motion pictures and teamed up with Chris and I to bring that insight and power to the world of information and no one had thought of doing that before.”
Chabot, an entrepreneur “by identity” had cut his teeth in data analytics after leaving college and had worked at SoftBank specialising in enterprise software as well as co-founding BeeLine Software, a pioneer of next-generation mapping technology. He is also the author of Understanding the Euro: The Clear and Concise Guide to the Trans-European Currency (McGraw-Hill, 1998), which he wrote as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow.
He sees Tableau as leading the charge for a new generation of software companies that will define the working world as we know it much the same way as Office from Microsoft has done in the past 20 or more years.
“I think there is a new productivity toolkit that is becoming important to modern knowledge workers and that certainly includes Tableau – a tool for refining facts for consuting them before making a decision, publishing them in artful ways into stories and presentations to persuade and impact the world.
“That is a resource that hasn’t been with us for the majority of modern industry and it is only now that it is coming to the fore and Tableau is leading that revolution.”
What employers are looking for today
Chabot cited research from the University of Notre Dame on what employers were looking for today.
“They found that the most likely skills that employers were looking for were in the world of data analysis in addition to other common things you are supposed to know about like the social graph, social networking web and internet publishing. Data is coming into that realm now and it is something that we would like to help with.”
To accommodate this change Tableau is making its software available for free to students.
In a rare move for US technology CEOs, Chabot is leading his company’s international charge from the frontline and has moved lock, stock and barrel to London in order to be close to the business and forge relationships.
“Ireland was attractive to us its great pool of talent, people speaking many languages, people interested in technology, and so we started about two years ago and we expect to build one of the bigger tech presences in Dublin.
“When we arrived in Dublin two years ago we had two people in Tableau Ireland and as we speak we are about 33 and you will see we have 16 open positions; we are moving into new offices and we are here for the long term.”
Tableau Software is a Silicon Republic Featured Employer, comprised of top tech companies that are hiring now
