Windows Azure DataMarketCustomer Solution Case Study

Software Developer Delivers Valuable Service with Easy-to-Integrate Data Marketplace

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Software engineering

Customer ProfileBased in Seattle, Washington, Tableau Software delivers software to help customers transform, visualize, and better understand business data. The company has 195 employees.

Business SituationTableau saw an opportunity to help customers find, subscribe to, and analyze selected data as a service directly from its core rapid-fire business intelligence products.

SolutionBy using the DataMarket application programming interface, Tableau added access to the premium content available in DataMarket to its products with minimal effort.

Benefits Gained simplified, programmatic

access to data service Delivered value-added customer

service Maintained focus on core business

“[Windows Azure] DataMarket provides data sets that deliver incredible value to our customers. Data as a service is something we could not do before without DataMarket.”

Ellie Fields, Director of Product Marketing, Tableau Software

Tableau Software gives its customers a way to transform their business data from text into rich visualizations and business intelligence. Previously, customers connected from Tableau software only to internal data sources. If customers wanted to use public data in analyses, they had to find and format that data on their own—a time-consuming process. Tableau saw an opportunity to deliver data as a service, but did not want to change its business and become a data provider. Instead, Tableau chose to add access to DataMarket, the premium data service component of the Windows Azure Marketplace, to the Tableau products—giving customers an easy way to connect to external data that augments business data. As a result, Tableau gained simple programmatic access to a data marketplace, added a valuable customer service with minimal effort, and maintained focus on its core business.

SituationTableau Software, based in Seattle, Washington, helps customers answer questions about data. The company’s proprietary technology enables users to drag and drop data from data sources and quickly produce rich visualizations that lead to valuable business intelligence. Tableau calls it “rapid-fire business intelligence.”

Tableau serves tens of thousands of customers in nearly every industry, from Fortune 500 companies to self-employed consultants. Anyone with an interest in business intelligence can benefit from using Tableau software. The company has three products: a desktop application that provides the drag-and-drop functionality for data visualization; a server-based product that gives users the ability to share their results online, such as on a Microsoft SharePoint site or wiki on a corporate network; and a cloud-based version of the server product that enables customers, such as journalists, to make their data publicly available.

With one click, a customer can connect to a data source—such as a Microsoft SQL Server database or Excel spreadsheet—and pull data into the Tableau application for analysis. The company’s products are quick to deploy and let the end user ask and answer their own questions—a key differentiator among industry competitors.

Tableau recognized a trend toward proliferation of data. In addition to analyzing the data sets that customers own, such as corporate sales information, customers want to augment their data with other data, such as U.S. Census Bureau information, and combine that data for

even richer business intelligence. “As an example, a customer may want to combine sales data for a particular postal code with population data for that same postal code to see what kind of saturation the business has in that area,” explains Ellie Fields, Director of Product Marketing at Tableau Software.

Though Tableau wants to continually improve its services and offer value-added capabilities for its customers to gather, visualize, and analyze data, it does not want to change its business model and become a data provider. “It’s a fine line—we want to deliver valuable services, but we don’t want to take our focus away from what we do best, which is building business intelligence software,” says Fields.

At the same time, external data can be difficult to find and time-consuming to purchase—often requiring companies to create purchase orders and follow other lengthy processes. When companies do find the information that they’re looking for, it is often unstructured data in a variety of formats. It can take hours of research to find data and then up to five hours to reformat that data into usable information. “It’s like the Wild West of data—data is everywhere and in every format that you can possibly imagine,” explains Fields. “We recognize that it can be a time-consuming process for our customers to get their hands on the data that they want.”

SolutionAfter the release of version 5.0 of the Tableau product line in May 2010, the company held a three-day “hackathon.” With every major release, the company allows its developers to program for the

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“The DataMarket API is based on standards like HTTP authentication and REST, which made integration very straightforward.”

Andrew Beers, Vice President of Development, Tableau Software

products without direction or restriction, and often the next great product feature is created. During the May hackathon, one developer coded basic integration to DataMarket. Part of the Windows Azure Marketplace, DataMarket enables people to easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions. The information marketplace brings data, imagery, and real-time web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources together into a single location, under a unified provisioning and billing framework.

Impressed with the premium content that DataMarket provides, Tableau decided to include DataMarket as a data source option in its products. By doing so, Tableau would enable its customers to easily access additional content to augment corporate

data. After defining the scope of the project, developers integrated DataMarket with the Tableau products in one day using existing tools, such as the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional development system, and the DataMarket application programming interface (API), which is based on HTTP authentication standards and a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface.

When using Tableau software, customers see DataMarket as a data source option, along with other data sources such as Microsoft Access, Excel spreadsheet software, and SQL Server database management software (see Figure 1). After choosing DataMarket, customers provide their DataMarket account key for authentication and then search and find the data sets that they want. Customers then import the structured, formatted data directly into Tableau, a process that uses the Open Data (OData) protocol. Once customers have data from DataMarket, they can combine that information with their own corporate data for deep business intelligence.

In September 2010, Tableau started testing the feature in a beta release with hundreds of customers. The company released DataMarket access to all of its customers with the Tableau 6.0 product release in November 2010. In addition, Tableau plans to continue adding new capabilities with DataMarket beyond connecting to and authenticating data sets. For instance, the company is exploring options for improved browsing and filtering capabilities.

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Figure 1. When using Tableau, customers see DataMarket as a data source option.

BenefitsBy choosing to integrate with DataMarket, Tableau Software gained simple, programmatic access to premium data offered by content providers and included the valuable service in its products, giving its customers data as a service. Tableau delivered the capability for customers to find, access, and analyze data sets to augment their existing business data—enabling rich data visualization and rich business intelligence—all while maintaining focus on its core business.

Simplified Programmatic Access to Data Service By using the DataMarket API and familiar Visual Studio tools to generate service references, developers at Tableau quickly and easily added access to the premium content available in DataMarket to the Tableau products. The API is based on open protocol and industry standards that make it easy to consume the data sets in the format that Tableau needs. “The DataMarket API is based on standards like HTTP authentication and REST, which made integration very straightforward,” explains Andrew Beers, Vice President of Development at Tableau Software. “We didn’t have to puzzle through complicated APIs and could focus our technical resources on making the integration very polished.”

Created New, Value-Added Service Prior to the company adding DataMarket access to Tableau products, customers could connect to many types of their own data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, and Microsoft Excel, but did not connect to any information marketplace. Now, customers can connect to

DataMarket, find premium content, such as U.S. Census Bureau data, and easily import that information into Tableau for visualization. “DataMarket provides data sets that deliver incredible value to our customers,” says Fields. “Data as a service is something we could not do before without DataMarket.”

By using DataMarket, Tableau customers can tame data that exists unstructured in other locations. Previously, customers could possibly find the publicly available data that they needed, but the process was time-consuming and the data often required additional formatting. “DataMarket offers a central place to connect to a myriad of data sources and find structured data that is easy to work with,” says Fields. “It takes the friction out of any analysis or business intelligence that customers are doing.”

Maintained Focus on Core BusinessNot only was Tableau able to deliver value-added services to its customers, but it did so while maintaining sharp focus on its core business. “We are not in the business of providing data and that’s not a market we want to get into,” explains Fields. “However, DataMarket gives us a way to meet our customers’ needs without changing our business model, adding a new line of business, or drawing our focus away from what we do best—building business intelligence software.”

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“DataMarket gives us a way to meet our customers’ needs without changing our business model, adding a new line of business, or drawing our focus away from what we do best—building business intelligence software.”

Ellie Fields, Director of Product Marketing, Tableau Software

Windows Azure PlatformThe Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include:

Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.

Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure offers the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.

Windows Azure AppFabric. With Windows Azure AppFabric, developers can build and manage applications more easily both on-premises and in the cloud.−   AppFabric Service Bus connects services and applications across network boundaries to help developers build distributed applications.−   AppFabric Access Control provides federated, claims-based access control for REST web services.

Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. Developers and information workers can use the new service DataMarket to easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.

To learn more, visit: https://datamarket.azure.com

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Tableau Software products and services, call (206) 633-6400 or visit the website at: www.tableausoftware.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published January 2011

Software and Services Windows Azure Platform−Windows Azure Marketplace

DataMarket

Microsoft Visual Studio−Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Professional