Tableau's market value soars past that of competitor QlikTech on first day of trading

Tom Paine

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Photo / Business Wire

Business Intelligence vendor Tableau (I think the preferred term now is data discovery and visualization) closed its opening day of trading (on the NYSE under the symbol "DATA") yesterday at $50.75, up almost 64% from its opening price to the public of $31.00, giving it a market capitalization of about $2.9 billion.

Its Radnor-based competitor, QlikTech, closed yesterday at $30.68, with a market cap of $2.65 billion. QlikTech held its IPO on July 16, 2010.

Seattle-based Tableau had been growing at more than 100% per year and had total revenue of $127.7 million in 2012. It posted a net loss of $3.7 million on revenue of $40 million during this year's first quarter, up 62% from the pior year. QlikTech reported total Q1 2013 revenue of $96.5 million, up 22% from the prior year's first quarter, and a GAAP loss of $16.8 million.

Tableau and QlikTech are by no means apples to apples competitors, though they frequently come up for direct comparison (but QlikTech CEO Lars Björk downplays in presentations how often they compete for the same accounts). Tableau's strength's are seen as data visualization and "rapid fire" ad hoc query capabilities, and being easier for end users who are not data analysts or developers to use. QlikTech is probably better suited to heavier (more structured) data analysis and for the sheer speed of its in-memory processing (although Tableau also uses in-memory technology).

Another distinction between the two is that while QlikTech originated in Sweeden and gradually expanded into other regions of the world and its revenue distribution still reflects its European roots, only 17% of Tableau's 2012 revenue came from outside the US and Canada, according to its S-1.

QlikTech announced earlier this month it had acquired Sweeden-based NComVA, a company it was already partnering with, to enhance its visualization technology.

QlikTech shares have also had a nice spike this month, up 20% and hitting a 52 week high, partially spurred on by the prospects of the Tableau IPO and perhaps a sense among some investors that QLIK was undervalued relative to the value given to Tableau.




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Daily Links 4/26/2013: QlikTech rises on results; Philly.com owners lose arbitration ruling on trademark challenge to Philly2Philly.com

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What’s the SD Benchmark for ERP Apps Running on SAP HANA? (Thomas Wailgum/ASUG News)

Why in-memory computing is going mainstream
(Information Age)

Qlik Technologies Inks Larger Deals As Q1 Beats (Investor's Business Daily)


Interview: Dell software chief talks transformation (PC World)


AT&T rolls Digital Life home automation service in Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox markets (FierceCable)

LevelUp closes nearly all its remote offices, including Philly (Technical.ly Philly)

Whose Website is it Anyway? Philadelphia legal firm tames new frontier (Keystone Edge)

Philadelphia Inquirer wants to own the term “Philly” (Domain Name Wire)
Paper's owner loses arbitration ruling to Philly2Philly.com.




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SAP HANA consultant John Appleby, UK-based Bluefin Solutions set up shop in Philadelphia

Tom Paine

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John Appleby has crossed the Big Pond and settled outside Philadelphia.

Appleby is with Bluefin Solutions (not to be confused with the Bluefin just reported by the Business Insider to have been acquired by Twitter), a large UK-based SAP consulting firm with close to 200 employees, as its Global Head of SAP HANA. He is also among a distinguished group known as SAP Mentors, of which there are approximately 100, representing those considered by their peers to be the top experts in the field.

John Appleby

A native of London who has spent considerable time over here in the past, Appleby is now making a permanent move to establish a beachhead for Bluefin in the US, particularly for its growing HANA practice. HANA, which has been considered variously as an acronym for HAsso's New Architecture (a reference to SAP founder Hasso Plattner) or High Performance ANalytic Appliance, though neither is a formal name, is SAP's in-Memory processing platform which is said to accelerate the speed at which some tasks can be completed by 100 to 1,000 times. It achieves this by largeley replacing the tme-consuming swapping of data from in and out of disk drives to the use of large amounts of random access memory to keep more data within the core CPU during processing. While other vendors use in-Memory to varying degrees, probably no other has an architecture that deploys in-Memory on such a scale, and SAP has made it clear it will become the foundation for its entire range of product offerings. SAP said that revenue from HANA, which first shipped in late 2010, reached $532.5 million in 2012.

For now, Bluefin is focusing primarily on converting customer data warehouses using SAP NetWeaver BW to HANA, Appleby told me in a phone interview. SAP announced at the beginning of this year that its flagship Business Suite ERP (enterprise resource planning) software is now able to run on top of HANA, although it will still be in beta until some time later in the year. Appleby says there might be some significant developments concerning ERP on HANA at SAP's SAPPHIRE NOW conference in May. While ERP, with its emphasis on transaction processing, doesn't gain as much speed from HANA as data retrieval and analytical functions, a key benefit it gains is in breaking down the wall between analytics and and transaction processing that typifies most database architectures. Another hope for SAP is to displace arch-rival Oracle as the provider of the underlying database on top of which SAP ERP often runs.

Appleby says Bluefin has a small base in the US now with "a few people working on projects", but he hopes that will increase significantly over the year and produce a few million dollars in billings. As Bluefin adds people in the US, some will be located in the Philly area but others will be based elsewhere. He said he chose Philly (rather than say Palo Alto) because Newtown Square is home base for SAP's "go-to-market" sales and customer service teams, because of the proximinity of potential customers, and because he finds it generally to be a more well-grounded and balanced place than Silicon Valley. Also, its difficult to keep in touch with colleagues back in Europe from the west coast hours.

Ask what he likes about Philadelphia, he mentions its tremendous culinary tradition ("a well kept secret") and likes the fact that one can travel to a lot of places quickly from there. What he doesn't like is the history of corruption in the city (though he quickly adds that he has met Mayor Nutter and thinks there are signs of progress under his leadership) and its infrastructure problems.



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Daily Links 6/23/2010: Evolved Capital launches beta app targeting Venture Capital Ecosystem

Comcast's ThePlatform Reaches For IP-Connected TV Devices
Integrates With Over-the-Top Services From TiVo, Roku, LG, Boxee, Others (Multichannel News)

Parties still far apart in US Internet talks-source
* More talks scheduled for Wednesday (Reuters)

FCC Takes Beating Over Closed Door Net Neutrality Meeting
Transparency and documentation is either important -- or it isn't. (Broadband Reports)

Fitch cuts rating on Liberty Media unit (Associated Press via Google News)

SAP Labs Is Hiring Up to 300 in Palo Alto (eWeek Blogs)

SAP's McDermott Sees No Big Acquisitions After Sybase (Bloomberg)
Doesn't quite jibe with what co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said in prepared remarks for the SAP annual meeting a couple of weeks ago.

SAP value engineering services aim to boost SAP ROI (SearchSAP.com)

Evolved Capital Beta Launch Targets Venture Capital Ecosystem (Marketwire)


Verizon tests 10 Gbps to the home via FiOS (ZDNet Blogs)
Using Motorola's 10 Gbps GPON solution.

SAS Preps In-memory Analytic Grids (PC World)
Focusing on vertical solutions.

Startups replacing summer jobs for students (Reuters)




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