After acquiring Tableau Software last year through a transaction of $15.7 billion, Salesforce has now announced that Einstein Analytics will now be integrated with Tableau and it will be rebranded as Tableau CRM. With this integration, Salesforce hopes to provide the users with several benefits such as:

• A simpler way to connect any data
• Integrating the visual analytics capabilities of Tableau with the deep AI capabilities of Einstein Analytics
• Help in faster decision making

The intent behind this decision is to project Tableau as the analytics brand for Salesforce and integrate Einstein Analytics’ capabilities into its full offering, including — Tableau Desktop for visual analytics; Tableau Prep for visual data preparation; Tableau Server for self-managed analytics platform; Tableau Online for analytics platform as a service; and Tableau CRM for native Salesforce analytics.

What to Expect from Tableau CRM

While both Tableau and Einstein Analytics are focused on analytics, they use different technologies and have different use cases.

Tableau uses a proprietary technology VizQL that translates user actions into interactive visualisations that can help a user to explore data and pivot analysis. This platform provides limitless data exploration and visualisation, connectivity to data anywhere, and deployment and integration capabilities.

On the other hand, Einstein Analytics allows the user to combine internal data with the external and provides a more intelligent experience. Einstein Analytics also offers AI/ML capabilities for building predictive models.

With the integration, the user will be able to perform the following activities:

• Tableau can now query data stored in Einstein Analytics, thus revealing deep exploration capabilities of Tableau queries. 
• Einstein Analytics can now create extracts in Tableau containing Salesforce data by being able to write data into Tableau.
• Tableau Prep will be able to write to both Tableau and Einstein Analytics. This gives the user a choice to choose the right platform for their needs.

With Tableau CRM, Salesforce hopes to integrate dynamic machine learning-enabled predictions, insights, and recommendations to Tableau with the integration of Einstein Discovery, which will be launched in 2021. Einstein Discovery is different from Einstein Analytics in a way that it is a prescriptive and a predictive analytical tool, which provides recommendations, explanations, and prediction based on data source without building a sophisticated data model. In contrast, Einstein Analytics is a self-service analytics platform that helps in data visualisation and exploration.

Speaking at Tableau Conference (ish) 2020 (TC20), Bobby Brill, the product management director of the Einstein Analytics team, said that the following features would be made available:

• A new extension to the Tableau dashboard will bring predictions, explanation, and suggestions to improve Einstein Discovery outcomes in the Tableau vizzes. Anybody with access can have a look and suggest actions to be taken without requiring any coding.
• Einstein Discovery will also be integrated into the calculation engine of Tableau, which will enable users to use prediction capability with much ease. Einstein Discovery powered time prediction can now be obtained just by dragging and dropping predictive calculations into the viz.
• The data prep is now easier, and with Einstein Discovery, users can add prediction nodes as a step in the prep flow and improve data sets.

Wrapping Up

With its easy to build business reports and dashboards, Tableau has been extremely popular. With its new collaboration, new horizons open up, especially in terms of the reach and the effectiveness of Analytics Solution built around the Salesforce Analytics tools. Einstein Analytics and Discovery offer added advantage of predictive analytics and use cases in the areas of accounts or to the sales to grow business. While using Einstein products for Salesforce Users lead to effective utilisation, Tableau yields a collaborative and successful approach towards analytics for business. Einstein Discovery and Analytics and Prediction API can be used in Tableau for further analysis through Tableau reports and dashboards.