2018 Tech Impact Awards, Enterprise: Tableau Software

This article appears in print in the October 2018 issue. See more about the winners of the 2018 Tech Impact Awards here. Click here for a free subscription.

Tableau Software
Location: Seattle
Employees: 1,800

The company that strives to help people see and understand their data saw the story its own numbers were telling, that its future growth lay in the enterprise market. Under new CEO Adam Selipsky, Tableau redoubled its efforts to bring security and governance features to its pioneering analytics software, to support scaling across thousands of machines. As customers demand more, Selipsky explains, Were doubling down on things already in motion.

That initiative has included tools that streamline data prep, a faster data engine and a greater emphasis on its subscription model. Its a better model for most customers, Selipsky says. Youll pay only for the value youre getting in that time period. I love that value proposition.

Customers seem to agree, as subscriptions now make up more than two-thirds of Tableaus business, helping to boost total revenues 14 percent over the prior year. While Selipsky assures that Tableau will never neglect the small-scale analytics user that helped define its product, enterprises are pushing Tableau toward adventurous success.

Silver Award

Cray
Location: Seattle
Employees: 1,200 (worldwide)

As big data gets ever bigger, the worlds fastest supercomputers developed by Cray are essential for the most far-reaching projects. The Cray XC and CS series of high-performance computers, designed to handle the most challenging simulation, analytics and AI workloads, are widely employed in industry and research. At home, Crays partnership with Microsoft Azure helps sustain the regions dominance in cloud computing, where researchers, analysts and scientists can use deep learning, simulation and modeling to further fields like medical imaging and autonomous vehicles.