Dive Brief:
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Tableau announced its acquisition of ClearGraph last week, a company that uses natural language processing for data discovery and analysis, Tableau announced in a blog post.
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The three-year-old startup says it has a number of large enterprise customers, though ClearGraph declined to name them. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but ClearGraph had raised $1.53 million from Accel Partners prior to its acquisition.
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ClearGraph is trying to make it easier for humans and computers to communicate and in turn allow companies to use that data. Tableau has reportedly launched an internal project to build its own conversational interface for its service, according to TechCrunch, but purchasing ClearGraph will allow the company to gain NLP capabilities while saving time and resources.
Dive Insight:
Though data is seen as the new oil, organizations are still struggling to gain insight from the information they amass. That's where companies like Tableau come into play, touting services that help companies more easily see and understand data.
By bringing in ClearGraph, Tableau wants to make it easier for customers to use natural language to draw insights from data, a boon for companies using disparate tools to try and gather insight from data. It’s a smart move for Tableau, which is also capitalizing on the current fervor over anything that involves natural language processing.
Tableau has a strong competitor in Microsoft’s Power BI Premium, the new version of which was announced in June. But demand for data analysis products is high, leaving plenty of room for data analysis products to thrive. Power Bi, for example, was launched in 2015 and already is actively used by more than 200,000 organizations.
