Cobalt: Data insight at the speed of the web

Tableau: Would you tell us about who uses Tableau at Cobalt?
Sid Wray. Business Intelligence Product Manager: We have about 65 Tableau Desktop users. And then we have a Tableau Server with about a thousand users—so they're consuming dashboards that these authors have made.

Tableau: That’s great. What departments use Tableau?
Sid: We have Insights groups that use it for analytics and reporting dashboarding. Advertising teams using it for optimization. Development teams using it for testing, software development processes.

We have a lot of our development teams using it, and we just have such a huge opportunity to take advantage of all of the data that we're generating from our business that Tableau Desktop has enabled us to leverage that data and then the servers (are) allowing us to put it in the hands of end users.

I'm a product manager working with development teams.

So now we use it for sort of rapid prototyping. We have a lot of our data science organization uses it to represent the results of the models and statistical analysis that they're generating; they're able to use it as a communication tool back to the business for some of that pretty advanced stuff.

So (there are) lots of different use cases throughout all kinds of different teams. It's really the fact that anybody can use it to make their internal teams' businesses more efficient and effective that is really powerful for us.

Tableau: What data sources are you using with Tableau?
Sid: So we have about 15 terabytes of data. We recently installed a new scalable data warehouse and so it's growing 3X to 5X a year. We're connecting to a Greenplum Data Warehouse. We have some systems that use Microsoft SQL Server. So it's a variety of systems, lots of Excel files, SAAS, but primarily Greenplum as an enterprise data warehouse.

Tableau: How are you benefiting from Cobalt’s adoption of Tableau?
Sid: Tableau has enabled me to move beyond just monkeying around with data, raw data, and getting that data in the hands of the person who is asking the questions. And that frees up my time to then focus and think at a higher level about where opportunities are and be a little bit more creative with the opportunity that we have.