The release, arguably projects Tableau as a developer-friendly platform considering that Tableau 10 and its APIs were conceptualized and created from inputs from the Tableau Community through its Developer Portal. With as may as 30 new capabilities, the revamp of its existing design (interface) and visual analysis offerings also brought along analytical and mobile enhancements.
Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Tableau said, “Tableau is opening up our platform to provide more choice and flexibility to our customers. It’s about enabling developers to build new experiences for people to more easily see and understand their data. It’s about enabling automation and simplification to deploy Tableau. And it’s unleashing opportunities for developers to integrate embedded analytics into every area of the business.”
According to Tableau, its APIs give developers the flexibility to connect with any data source and integrate Tableau into any application for easy embedded analytics. Reportedly, companies in the Tableau Community have used these APIs to build new ‘Web Data Connectors. They have been able to embed Tableau visualizations into web sites, scrape data to create Tableau extracts, and build a tracking tool to follow interactions with visualizations’.
According to the company, this could help organizations make use of their data and identify business intelligence in real-time, to enhance customer engagement following it. Apparently partners including Automated Insights, Narrative Science and Yseop are leveraging Tableau JavaScript API called getData()–a part of Tableau 10 release–enhancements to bring natural language generation (NLG) into Tableau visualizations.
Natural language generation (NLG) refers to the use of advanced technology to create narratives, stories, or analyses. NLG can make data, charts, and dashboards more accessible to more people by providing textual descriptions and interpretation. NLG can also provide a faster path to insights by indicating trends to be further explored, as appeared in Tableau blogpost by ben Lower, Product Manager, Tableau.
Tableau Deployment
Tableau’s new APIs also claim to streamline deployments and automate business processes like:
- Automating administrative tasks with REST APIs: Expanded with more metadata information options, user result filtering
- Leveraging Data Integration and Data preparation: To refresh an external data prep job from Tableau while remaining in the flow of analysis using the Web Data Connector
- Creating a template workbook: To deploy across multiple servers and databases, allowing organizations to keep source connection up-to-date with the new document API
Not long ago, in August, Tableau expanded its core management team when it roped in former Amazon Web Service (AWS) executive Adam Selipsky as its new CEO. The congratulatory messages, were then extended to Felicia Hu who came onboard and took charge as Communications Manager for the APAC region.
