Growing revenues at ~30% YoY, gross margin of 88% and plenty of space to grow, I wonder why I have not heard about DATA here before. They are switching their business model to subscription-based over last year or so.
(Quarter over same quarter previous year, first data point is the newest)
Sales, General and administrative: 13% 15% 16% 20%
Total operating expense: 14% 16% 16% 16%
P/S (last 4 quarters): 7 8 7 6
$1bn in cash, 30% steady in R&D, huge community.
This company makes great product which does not really have competition (I know that people will try to claim Microsoft BI or Oracle BI or DOMO, Alteryx or similar), but in the space of exploratory data visualization Tableau’s capabilities are unmatched.
I would say that they deserve moat for switching costs, e.g. our company runs Tableau and re-training ~ 20 data analyst for different product, re-building all the reports/dashboards would be big undertaking.
The why is because of Alteryx. Alteryx has been a far superior investment growing at nearly 2x as fast as Tableau and in a better market position than Tableau.
No argument on past growth, but Tableau is just about the defacto standard in data analytics visualization. I’ve seen more than a few RFPs at my company being responded to with Tableau as part of the proposed solution - none ever with Alteryx.
This company makes great product which does not really have competition (I know that people will try to claim Microsoft BI or Oracle BI or DOMO, Alteryx or similar), but in the space of exploratory data visualization Tableau’s capabilities are unmatched.
FYI: This is a dangerous way to think about the competition. Just because your product is better does not mean there is no competition - just that at this point in time you are likely to have higher win rates. Things can change quickly…
PS: I don’t think Tableau’s products are significantly better.
Alteryx CEO on Mad Money recently - mentions the difference between AYX and DATA at 3:40 mark - “We’re not competitors…” (I couldn’t hear clearly what few words he said after the word “competitors”, FWIW) - the two companies deal with different types of data it seems.
I too think DATA is a great company, and wondering why the stock has not done better. However, Tableau does have a lot more competition in the data visualization space these days than it used to (although I agree that it continues to be ahead of the pack by most counts). Some of the competition:
QlikView
TIBCO Spotfire
MicroStrategy (used to be more of classic BI product, but if you’ve seen a recent version of their product, parts of it are really hard to distinguish from Tableau)
Sisense
and a slew of smaller competitors (Looker, etc.) Also, in addition to MicroStrategy, all the other big old BI players (Cognos, Oracle, Board, etc.) have essentially copied Tableau’s visualization stuff with a mixed degree of success. While they will never beat Tableau head to head in a data visualization RFP, tons of organizations already have their packages, and throwing their version of a data visualization tool in for free into an existing large contract is a great way to keep an enterprise customer.
I will take a crack at your question based on what I observe in my place of work, though. I think what might be going on is that with the recent wave of data wrangling, big data, AI and machine learning, data visualization itself has fallen somewhat out of the sweet spot. Tableau is wonderful for exploratory visualization, but it can only work with as much data as your desktop computer can handle comfortably. Even with engineering tricks that isn’t all that much (let’s be generous and say about 10GB max) as compared to terabyte+ data sets that are handled by big data and machine learning type technologies. Now granted, no one visualizes terabyte+ data sets; machine learning is a different use case. Nonetheless, users really don’t like having to switch tools to handle different aspects of their jobs. Increasingly, I think people want more than just great visualization out of their product; they also want great data prep (Alteryx and the like), as well as standard formatted reporting (which Tableau is piss poor at but old school BI products are good at), and maybe even some of those server-side data crunching/machine learning capabilities thrown in for good measure. I think this is why we see Tableau spreading into prep and Alteryx spreading into visualization, and both products rapidly integrating things like R into their feature set. So I think perhaps that “ideal feature set” is a bit of a moving target right now, and Tableau is not quite as spot on against that target as it used to be.
That’s just my best stab at it, mind you. Overall, I am still rather surprised DATA is not doing better than it is.
Increasingly, I think people want more than just great visualization out of their product; they also want great data prep (Alteryx and the like), as well as standard formatted reporting (which Tableau is piss poor at but old school BI products are good at), and maybe even some of those server-side data crunching/machine learning capabilities thrown in for good measure. I think this is why we see Tableau spreading into prep and Alteryx spreading into visualization, and both products rapidly integrating things like R into their feature set.
I think this sums it up well. I also think Tableau (and its competitors, but with Tableau being the most successful) has been sold as a magical tool that makes every end user an analytical and visualization guru, and that is not the case. Yes, the tools are easier to use than legacy tools, but the strength is as you say, in data exploration, and not the standardized dashboard/reporting that management and other information consumers in the organization need and want.