The business intelligence (BI) event of the year—the Tableau User Conference—convened last week in Austin, Texas with more than 13,000 data-heads on hand to immerse themselves in all things visual and beautiful.

Tableau did not disappoint its eager fans. It unveiled a raft of compelling product enhancements, including new governance, natural language processing, automation, cataloging, mapping, cloud, collaboration, and visualization capabilities, as well as Tableau running on Linux. Most importantly, it announced a new data engine (i.e. Hyper) designed to significantly bolster query performance against big data and a new data preparation tool, code-named Project Maestro.

The only downside to the parade of much-needed features is that most won’t ship until mid-2017, and some well beyond that.  By unveiling a three-year product roadmap, some might say that Tableau is exploiting its leadership position to “freeze” the market, a tactic commonly employed by front-runners in the old Unix and database wars.

However, many Tableau partners—including data preparation vendors who have the most to lose from the new announcements—were noticeably nonchalant. Most said Project Maestro won’t undercut their business or alter their partnership with Tableau. Most added that Project Maestro will take several years to mature and is geared exclusively to the Tableau environment, unlike their products.

Growing Competition 

The far-reaching announcements might have more to do with BI competitors who are hitting Tableau closer to home. Microsoft PowerBI offers strong visual analysis functionality with fully baked natural language search at a cut-throat price of $9.99 per user per month. Qlik’s new flagship product, QlikSense, which now accounts for half of Qlik’s revenues, was built from the ground up as a fully modern analytic platform designed for the Web, mobile, governance, and custom development. 

Not to be outdone, cloud BI upstart DOMO staged an over-the-top guerrilla marketing campaign at the Tableau event, offering competing lounges and dance parties featuring top acts Snoop Dog and Flo Rider. It’s not clear that DOMO gained any new customers, but it sure made a ton of Tableau’s abundant millennial customers (and some older ones) extremely happy for a night!

Financial Issues. From a money perspective, despite adding thousands of customers each quarter and growing revenue at 20% or better, Tableau is under financial pressure from public investors who expect it to do better. Tableau’s stock has taken a hit this year, falling from a high of 102 twelve months ago to 46 this month. And a recent string of quarterly net earnings losses has not helped. Tableau recently announced a stock buy back plan, most likely to shore up its share price and avoid the fate of its chief rival, Qlik, who was acquired by a private equity firm in August after several years of net earnings decline.

Product Innovation 

Heightened competition and financial expectations make it imperative for Tableau to continue to innovate to keep pace or surpass its rivals. Here are the key features that Tableau announced at its event that I think will help it compete in the future:

• Data Governance. Tableau will introduce a new data catalog and management environment that enables users to search for content, profile data sources, including its usage, lineage and impact, and identify which objects have been “certified” by administrators and which have been “derived” by end users. Administrators can prune unused fields and certify objects, while users can promote output through a vetting process to attain a certification badge. These capabilities can foster data curation workflows and create a culture of governance within a self-service environment. Unfortunately, these features won’t begin to ship until later in 2017.
  
• Faster Performance and Refresh. Tableau acquired the Hyper data engine last year to replace the Tableau Data Engine, which is not keeping up with user requirements for fast queries and refreshes. The new Hyper data engine, which is primarily an in-memory columnar database that maximizes CPU and RAM on a single server, will be rolled out in 2017 to all Tableau products (including its new data preparation tool) starting now with Tableau Public with minimal disruption to Tableau deployments. Whereas the current Tableau Data Engine maxed out at 20GB to 30GB of data and could take hours to load, Hyper will scale to billions of rows and supports simultaneous queries and updates for both structured and unstructured data.
  
• Data Preparation. Project Maestro will finally give Tableau data analysts an end-to-end environment for creating, analyzing, and visualizing data. Currently, Tableau users depend on the IT department to create data sets, while more advanced analysts employ a third party data preparation tool, such as Alteryx. The new data preparation tool, which won’t roll out until mid-year at the earliest, will be a stand-alone product geared to data analysts or stewards who create data sets for others. From an initial glimpse, the product offers a polished, easy to use graphical interface that combines both a workflow- and data-centric view of preparation tasks. Besides bringing Tableau's famous ease-of-use paradigm to data prep, it offers Tableau and its investors an easy way to upsell customers and grow revenues and profits.
  
  
• Web Equivalency. Tableau was designed as a desktop tool. With the rise of the Web, cloud, mobile, and governance, a desktop tool is fast becoming a liability. Tableau announced that its Web-based offering will soon be equivalent in functionality to its desktop offering, giving Tableau Online, which already has 5,000 customers,  a big boost. There is growing momentum for moving BI--and all computing functions--to the cloud, so Tableau's timing here is critical for keeping up with market trends and competitors.  

It seems a little odd that Tableau skyrocketed to fame just a few years ago and is now under considerable financial and competitive pressure. But that’s life in a red-hot technology market where competition breeds innovation and demanding customers seek the latest products to gain an edge and optimize technology investments.