The only constant is change – Tableau CRM becomes CRM Analytics

Salesforce/Tableau has just announced that they will rebrand Tableau CRM to CRM Analytics!

This is the latest change in a long list of rebrandings and quite an interesting one.

After the acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce, the company decided to rebrand what used to be called “Einstein Analytics” to “Tableau CRM” in an effort to consolidate their analytics offering under the well-known “Tableau” brand.

While I think the intention of this idea was good, in practical terms this caused a lot of confusion. Suddenly there were two products that offered ETL, Data Visualisation and (to a degree) predictive tools that were both called “Tableau”.

Customers had problems understanding why they had to get a different tool with the same name to take advantage of added functionalities, partners and Tableau staff had to navigate these questions and had to be very careful in client conversations to define terms and use names consistently to explain which “Tableau” did what.

After this intro you can probably guess that I am a big fan of the rebrand. Admittedly, this will cause some more confusion short term, but I think it will make the way forward much easier and clear cut when you are talking about Analytics platforms within or outside of the Salesforce ecosystem.

What does that mean?

For anybody already working with or considering former “TCRM”, with the new “CRM Analytics” nothing really changes other than the name and the logo. Features, licensing and the interface stay exactly as they are. Depending on your environment and corporate setup you might need to consider some secondary changes: for example, adjusting naming of permission sets, roles, updating your documentation and maybe renaming the team that deals with the tool.

While the change to “Tableau CRM” suggested that the two tools will move much closer together and maybe even merge at some point, this new change, for me, points into a slightly different direction.

• CRM Analytics will become the Salesforce native analytics solution; whenever you need predictions or prescriptive insights inside the Salesforce ecosystem, this will be the tool of choice. In that regard it is similar to Salesforce Reports and Dashboards but much more powerful with its AI offering and the data transformation and visualisation capabilities.
• Tableau on the other hand will continue to grow as a data platform that connects to virtually anything. Over time it will extend the integration with Salesforce even further so that access to TCRM data, the SF security model and the action framework will be supported as well.

Admittedly, there is some overlap between the two already and the best tool for an organisation usually depends on many other factors as well. If you are interested in exploring the Salesforce analytics offerings in detail, get in touch with me to have a chat.

Over the next 12-24 months it will be interesting to see how this change actually affects the new features that are released and if Tableau keeps the pace with which they integrated with Salesforce.

If you are interested in the latest developments, don’t miss this year’s Tableau Conference on the 18^th and 19^th of May.

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Alex Waleczek is Davanti’s Practice Lead – Analytics. 

In his role he is responsible for all things data. Having worked as a consultant with Tableau in the analytics space in New Zealand for the last six years, he is very familiar with the problems companies face when trying to make sense of their data and how to solve them to bring our clients closer to their clients. When he is not working on Tableau for Davanti, he is blogging privately about all things data and hiking New Zealand. You can get in touch with him via our contact form, LinkedIn or Twitter.