Attendance at this year’s Tableau Conference 2016 was at an all-time high with over 13,000 people coming to Austin, TX to discuss their data and analytics challenges. Tableau is driving a significant movement in world of business intelligence and people seem more energized and excited than ever about seeing and understanding their data.

To recap the event, let’s look at some of the biggest changes coming to Tableau and how these advancements are going to empower business to ask better questions, think more deeply, and solve some of their biggest problems.

What's Coming Soon to Tableau

Analytics

Tableau is known for making analytics easier for everyone, and in keeping to that promise – automatic analysis was a big trend this year. Instant Analytics is a new capability that will automatically provide contextual information as users interact with their data to help them find insights faster. Natural Language Processing is another impressive feature that lets users interact with their data by asking questions. The system can handle ambiguity, colloquial expression and conversions with your data and filter based on human language.

Project Maestro

In addition to new features, this year’s conference also introduced entirely new product innovations. In 2017, Tableau will launch a new data prep product, code-named “Project Maestro,” signifying the company’s expansion into the data integration and prep industry. This new product makes it possible for both IT and business users to easily fix data right from the analytics using a visual approach for which Tableau is known.

A New Data Engine

Data is growing at an exponential rate, and with that comes growing expectations from users to have immediate answers from the freshest data. In response to this mounting challenge, Tableau has introduced a next generation in-memory data engine that lets you perform sophisticated analysis on billions of records in near real-time.

Tableau Server for Linux

IT and developers will be happy to hear that Tableau announced a version of Tableau Server for Linux platform. This means businesses of all sizes will be able to leverage the power of self-service analytics and benefit from lower licensing costs, reduced administration, more customization, and a more secure way to run Tableau Server in the cloud.

Governance

As the use of data becomes more pervasive throughout the organization, governance remains a top priority. Thus, Tableau is rolling out new governance features to help organizations maintain control of what, when, and how their data sources are being used. IT benefits because it gives them more control to define properties of data and create standard calculations. The business benefits because users are able to know which data sources are accurate and trustworthy.

Data-Driven Alerting

Tableau continues to look for new ways to help users get insights faster. Data-driven alerting & metrics is one of the many ways Tableau is making it easier for users to stay on top of their data. By setting up alerts, users will be notified when certain criteria have been met, allowing them to easily track the information that matters to them most.

Machine Learning

This wouldn’t be a recap of the biggest trends in business intelligence without touching on machine learning. To help supercharge analytics, Tableau is adding a new machine learning recommendation engine to its platform. These Smart Recommendations will surface based on workbooks and data sources that are trusted, highly used, and contextually relevant to helping bring additional insights into your workflow.

New Hybrid Data Connectivity for the Cloud

As all businesses are exploring new opportunities in the cloud, it’s important that Tableau allows you to deploy and connect your data from both on-prem and in the cloud. The tool's new live query agent will act as a secure tunnel to on-premises data. With Tableau Online, data will be easier to access and analyze. Prebuilt dashboards for popular web applications like Salesforce and Marketo are also becoming available to help users quickly build momentum as they introduce new online applications!