Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's session, Accelerate Enterprise Analytics and AI with Tableau Cloud. And thank you all so much for joining us today. My name is [ Arianna ], and I'm on the marketing team here at Salesforce. And before we begin, I'd like to cover a few quick notes with you about our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up, and it will be accessible through the URL that you are on right now. Please note the slides will advance automatically throughout this presentation. And you can enlarge them by clicking the enlarge slides button located in the top right-hand corner of your slides widget. Should you need technical assistance, click on the help widget located on the bottom left corner of your console. We've also added some additional resources, which are available through the resources window to the right of the slides. There you can find some additional related content. [Operator Instructions] We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can at the end of this presentation. And with that, I am turning things over to Kuber to get us started.

Thank you, [ Arianna ]. And thank you, everyone, for joining us. I know this is a global audience. I sit in Seattle but grateful for participation from all over the world. I'm excited to talk to you guys about how to accelerate enterprise analytics and AI with Tableau Cloud, but before we get started, I do want to share something, which is quick introductions. My name is Kuber. I lead product marketing for Tableau at Salesforce. And I'm joined by my esteemed colleague Evan. Evan, do you want to introduce yourself?

Yes. Hello, everyone. Evan Slotnick. I've been with Tableau Salesforce for almost 7 years; originally began as a solution engineer, helping customers every day; and moved over to development team a couple years back. And I focus specifically on Tableau Cloud.

Thank you, Evan. And he will be speaking a little bit more in detail in a few moments, while I get everyone started. Before we get detailed into the conversation, a quick heads-up: We will be talking a lot about what's coming up soon from Tableau, some of the feature and capabilities. We are working very, very hard on that, but we recommend not to make a purchase decision based on this conversation. With that, I want to start by saying a very, very big thank you again. It's Thursday morning, my time. You could be doing a million other things today, at this very moment; and you're instead spending time to hear from us. Or if you're watching this recorded, whatever time this is, thank you again for joining us. We are grateful for the opportunity. We'll try to keep this webinar informational, very crisp and to the point and, hopefully, a good investment of your time. With that, let's get started. Let's talk about data, one of my favorite topics. One of the statements I'd love to start off about is how data-driven companies are outperforming their competition. Now this is true today; and this has been true for a very, very long time. And if you are dialed in to this webinar, you are probably a data person and you do really believe in it. An interesting data point I have about data, see what I did there, is there's an interesting McKinsey point of view, which is data-driven companies can be as much as 19x more profitable than the companies that are not. That's incredible. So while non-data-driven companies, they are making 5% to 10% return on investment, significantly higher return on investments for data-driven companies, but why? Why is that? The answer is simple and complex at the same time. It's because they make the right decision with right data. And it's not just about having access to data. It's about having access to the intelligent insights with their analytics. Having data is like ocean. There's a lot of water in there, but to make it usable, it takes effort. And this is what we are going to -- here to talk about. And we've seen a lot of our customers do a lot of very interesting things with data. If you are in the U.S., you will recognize what a great year this has been for Texas Rangers. I'm a relatively new baseball fan; live in Seattle, rooting for Mariners, who also had a pretty decent year this year, but Rangers, I'm going to use a baseball pun, literally knocked it out of the park this year. And we are really proud of partnering with them in this journey. One of my favorite data points about the Rangers is 92% of their employees use Tableau today. And this could be frontline people. This could be people involved in [ plays ]. This could be a lot of other aspects of the team. They rely upon Tableau to make better decision. It's not just about businesses and organizations, but it's also about using data to improve every decision that you can. An interesting thing they did this year was drive lots of data points from lots of different sources. So this data point of 2,000% growth from unique revenue sources was driven because they were able to better serve their customers, but this is a baseball team and a stadium. All their marketing, all their fan analytics, all their real-time operational decisions are all taken with Tableau now. And this has been a tremendous year for them, but that's just one example. I'll be talking about a couple of more interesting examples about how organizations are transforming themselves with the power of Tableau. But the interesting thing that we learned from this example of Texas Rangers is that brilliant ideas and current decisions can come from anywhere, but many times, they cannot. One of the reasons are because different aspects of organizations are empowered with different level of access of data and analytics. Most organization, C-suite, the CXOs of the company, the senior leaders, they typically have great insights, but many times, these are the same people who are not taking all the decisions. Yes, they are taking decisions which are relevant to them, but a lot of ICs, frontline managers, middle-layer managers, they are also taking a lot of decisions. And what we've heard from our customers are, some of these folks who are not on the top of the pyramid, they don't get the right access to data insights. In fact, there's an interesting data point we've heard from our customers through our research. 94% of business leaders feel that their organization should be getting more value from its data. How is that possible? There is data everywhere, but not everybody is empowered to take the right decision with the right access to data. This is where we come in as Tableau. We believe Tableau helps customers start with data and move forward with this #1 analytics platform. A lot of organizations such as yourself have a lot of investments into data. There's a lot of barriers but -- effective enablement of insights across the organization. There may be issues such as dashboards have become our destination. There is a lot of manual development involved. There's a lot of task-specific data prep, but with the power of Tableau, you can actually build personalized insights and conversations using that data, bring out intelligent experiences in the flow of work for all your organization employees, ICs, frontline managers, middle managers and obviously the CXO, but also help them build semantics-governed data and self-sustaining data pipelines so it's all automated. It all enables speed. And most importantly, it's trusted data that can be verified and governed and managed at scale so that, at the end, what it's really driving is impact. That's a lot of words. How is it all possible? With a simple solution. We'd like to call it Tableau Cloud. It is the world's leading analytics platform. Our investment in the last few years have been to focus on 3 aspects: one, Evan will be sharing more details on this later, intuitive data experience for everyone. 20 years back, Tableau created the concept of self-service analytics. It ushered a whole new generation of data insights for everyone. It created a new persona of data analysts, but we believe not everybody has the right access to data. And we are investing in a lot of new experiences to make sure everyone in your organization have access to the right data. Second focus of investment: confidence and trust. What is data if you can't believe it? Because there's a lot of data floating around us, Tableau is investing to make sure you have full faith in your data so that you can take all the decision with confidence. And finally. We don't want to work in a world where we are tying you up to a certain infrastructure or certain investments. That's why Tableau is -- has decided to invest in building the most open, the most flexible and the most composable platform. No matter what your data estate looks like, no matter what your IT infrastructure looks like, no matter what cloud provider you want to pivot to or multi-cloud strategy that you are invested in, there is a way to easily integrate Tableau into your environment. And that's the promise of Tableau being a stand-alone data vendor. With that, let's talk a little bit about how Tableau's growth has been incredible. One of the ways we grow is by helping our customers do a lot more. One of our big European customers is Jaguar Land Rover. You are -- most of you will be familiar with the business they are in. They're in the business of cars. And Jaguar Land Rover decided to see their analytics investment not as a cost center but as a value driver. Their team built a new analytics center of excellence to make sure not just the data culture thrives through the organization and enabling each and every JLR employee to get access to the right data for the right decision-making. They also invested time and energy to understand the impact of this data, and I'm -- love to talk about them. They believe, in the first 3 years of deployment of Tableau Cloud, they got value worth -- sorry, not dollar, pound. This is U.S. -- U.K. GBP 200 million in just 3 years. And currently they are on a run rate of driving value of as much as GBP 0.25 billion every year. And they believe they can do this because Tableau just makes things easier, better and much more optimized, so this is an interesting way of not just looking at analytics investment as a cost center but looking at the value, measuring it and then scaling through that value. And Jaguar is just one of our customers. As of now, this slide may be a few days old now, but we are at the cusp of 4 million Tableau cloud users. For a product which was released less than 2 years ago, this is incredible penetration. With these $4 million (sic) [ 4 million ] customers, we've seen thousands, tens of thousands of Tableau Cloud sites out there driving millions of workbooks, connected to over 1 million data sources. What we've seen from our telemetry is, in a typical week, we have more than 10 million views of Tableau Cloud every week, more than 1 million published activities and 1 million subscriptions, so there are millions of you out there who are leveraging Tableau Cloud every day. And this is delivered in a way so that it's globally scalable and sustainable. The way Tableau Cloud investments have been done, we have our cloud pod locations or our data centers or our virtual data centers across the globe, so you sitting -- you may be sitting somewhere within a few hundred or maybe a few thousand miles of where Tableau Cloud is deployed. It's available in U.S. West, East; Canada; a couple of locations in Europe; but also in the Far East; and Australia. And we are investing a lot more locations, and by the end of the year, you will hear more about our upcoming investments and new pods coming in. So, so far, you've heard about what is Tableau Cloud, its incredible growth, what it can do for your business, but let's hear a little bit more in technical details of how to enterprise ready your cloud analytics. And for that, I welcome back Evan Slotnick. Evan, over to you.

Thanks, Kuber. As you just heard from Kuber, customers are choosing Tableau Cloud because they want the capabilities and features that are defining the Tableau experience but also have the ease and reliability of being hosted in the cloud. Tableau Cloud is efficient. It's consistent. It's super reliable and it's really fast. And so if we peel back the layers, what does that look like underneath the hood? So each pod, very quickly, is designed to host thousands of customer sites within a multi-tenant environment. And these service locations that we call pods are hosted within AWS. And we're leveraging their deep expertise in cloud analytics, et cetera for us to continuously improve the stability of the -- of our systems. It's highly available, as we are distributed across multiple availability zones, but so how does it actually work on the next-degree level? Each pod is fronted by an elastic load balancer, which when you then interact with a visualization, et cetera, it basically distributes that traffic to an available worker. Workbooks and data sources are primarily managed within our storage system that consists of site and content repository data which we host in Amazon RDS databases as well as S3. The reason I'm bringing this up, because this emulates how much Tableau Cloud can scale. It can do it seamlessly as more content is consistently added around the globe. For disaster recovery, Tableau Cloud is backing up its data every single day. And for redundancy, those backups are replicated across those multiple availability zones so that we have increased data reliability and retention. Given our highly available architecture, we have a "near no recovery time" objective, which means that we're going to meet you when you need analytics. We know that security and privacy of your data is really fundamental to the success of your organization, and that's why we take it so seriously. As part of the Salesforce family, Tableau Cloud has a rigorous compliance program and is consistently looking for new ways to ensure compliance with the vast array of certifications in the SaaS atmosphere. At present, Tableau Cloud enjoys SOC 2 and SOC 3 compliance as well as all the ISO certifications that are applicable to cloud analytics. These are industry benchmarks in the SaaS space that are globally recognized as the gold standards in data privacy and security. Last year, we obtained HIPAA compliance for our health care and life science customers, and as part of that initiative, we strengthened the security of data at rest and in transit. And we are continuously investing in Tableau Cloud's other certifications that cover so many different markets, from EMEA and APAC to the -- to North America and South America, because we want to make sure that the system is meeting the standards set by all those different regional governmental entities. And we're constantly pushing this envelope and obtaining new certifications because privacy and security is often that cornerstone of your corporate adoption. These certifications enable Tableau Cloud to operate with that global reach that Kuber was talking about but also minimize the risks for you all no matter where you're located. Red Hat is one of our customers that is taking advantage of Tableau Cloud's enterprise scale. Red Hat used a ton of different BI tools within their stack for all these different situations, but what that really meant is that they lacked a coordinated approach to analytics. They had a disconnected data strategy. Leaders constantly were finding it complicated to see that big picture and make those big key business decisions because it lacked data. And the data engineers and analysts struggled to make connections because the data was so siloed. They needed an analytics platform that spanned multiple sources; that ensured agile performance; and that really enabled cloud-based adoption, and collaboration, for that matter, so their solution was obviously to consolidate their analytics stack onto Tableau Cloud. In less than 3 months, Red Hat doubled its Tableau Cloud user base to over tens of thousands of employees. They did this while integrating more than 60 data sources. They nurtured this beautiful internal community where data leaders were promoting data literacy and trust throughout all levels of their organization so everyone was making data-driven decisions. As a result, by using Tableau Cloud, Red Hat achieved improved data accessibility and collaboration, leading to better processes, operations and customer service. But our industry has come such a long way, and arguably, so have we. At Tableau, we've always been embracing and adopting the newest innovations to really help our users be data-driven. Way back when, we invented a new language for data that made it significantly easier for millions to explore data and discover insights through drag-and-drop technology, right? They didn't need to know how to code. And it's made it so much dramatically easier than before to discover insights, but our goal to help people see and understand data is far from finished. There are so many more people out there who are not benefiting from the power of data, and for those people, innovation is around the corner because of generative AI with Tableau. So what does that mean? It means that we are on a journey to invent that new language for data, one that is accessible to all, which brings us to Tableau AI. We were super excited to make these announcements last year. And with Salesforce's core mission of AI plus data plus CRM, we are thrilled to announce the introduction of generative AI into Tableau. Specifically, Tableau AI is a suite of capabilities that brings trusted gen AI to Tableau, with the goal of simplifying and democratizing data analysis and insight consumption. It will empower users to -- with smart, personalized and contextual insights integrated into their daily flow of work. For me it's even accelerated the time to insight because I don't have to do all these repetitive tasks that I had to do before, because we're leveraging these things. It incorporates these smart suggestions and in-product guidance directly within Tableau. And it allows for the administrators to enable trusted, ethical and AI-powered experiences that fit the business needs without having to worry about that data security and privacy components, but this is not the only AI innovation for Tableau. We're also introducing Tableau Pulse. Generally available, Pulse on Tableau Cloud will reimagine analytics by making it personalized, contextual and smart to every individual that is touching it. Tableau Pulse empowers those users to enhance results. It focuses on metrics that are relevant to whatever it is that they're doing in their flow of work. And users are presented with a tailored collection of these metrics and personalized insights aligned with whatever it is that they're doing. It enables us to uncover fresh possibilities and proactively address challenges. I use it looking at our sales data. We're coming up at our fiscal end of the year. It tells me outlier behavior, all these sorts of things, so that -- it makes it more digestible for me to use every single day. Additionally, we want to ensure efficient collaboration with data; and Pulse seamlessly integrates data into that flow of work. When I'm using Tableau Pulse specifically, I don't need to read my flow of work. I'm using it on my phone, when I'm in Slack, when I'm talking on e-mail, all these different things. This enables all users to access relevant information within the context of whatever it is that they're doing, empowering them to make quickly well-informed, data-driven decisions. But Tableau provides the tools needed to ensure that business needs drive and provide input into data strategy practices and designs. Tableau Pulse is one component of the journey of data within your organization, so how do we empower business users and analysts across the entire organization to be this collaboration zone for enterprise-wide analytics? Our approach focuses on the top 5 areas needed to establish and maintain data-driven culture so that everyone can be making those data-driven decisions. It begins at the top. Inspiring those leaders to engage with data in a way that provides speed, that works for your business, that provides those contextual insights is really, at its core, what begins this data-driven culture. And we need to take analysis to the next level. We need to cultivate these competitive insights and promote data and data model reuse; and empower those with data needed to quench their curiosity, to answer whatever it is that they need answered, to help them move forward with their daily tasks, but you can't do this unless the data is trusted and it's in a scalable format. We need it in an easy-to-adopt workflow to get the full value of all your data. And it needs to be secure and it needs to be governed, right? You don't want it to become the wild, wild West of data, so governance and security ensures that we're taking good risks as an organization to move the business forward and we're not risking compliance in a -- parallel, but lastly, and this is probably the most important one to kind of feed those roots of the tree and getting data-driven analytics throughout the organization, is to build data skills throughout all levels. Keeping the entire organization interested and thriving with data is something really hard, but if you want to build a data program for longevity, it's not just about those single use cases. It needs to apply to everyone and be seamless and expand knowledge and expertise. With that. Our path together doesn't end here. If you want to learn more about Tableau Cloud: We have one-on-one demos, deep dives on products, upcoming virtual events and lots of great content. 2 specific pieces that I would love to call out, and I think the links are in the webinar portal, is the Total Economic Impact report examining Tableau, as well an ROI calculator to give you an idea of how much time and cost savings your organization can experience by moving to Tableau and Tableau Cloud. We're so excited to partner with you all on this journey. I hope you had the ability to take away how data is driving these analytical changes within a organization but also how does Tableau Cloud work and how are we empowering business users and analysts and business leaders to be data-driven. With that, Kuber and I are more than happy to stick around and answer questions. [Operator Instructions] We're more than happy to answer.

Thank you, Evan. And I do see there's a flurry of questions already available. And I am trying -- we are both trying our best to respond.

One recurring question that I've seen is about Tableau Pulse. Anybody can go and sign up for it. You just go to tableau.com/product/tableaupulse or just Google "Tableau Pulse." Go to the web page and sign up now. Also it should be generally available to all Tableau Cloud customers in a month or 2. We don't have exact date because we don't want to share -- we don't share it, for confidentiality reason, but it's coming very, very soon, Tableau Pulse. Most of the features will be available for free for all Tableau Cloud customers, so if you're a Tableau Cloud customer today, you will get the benefits of Tableau Pulse. Some of the generative AI-driven features may have a different pricing model. And we will talk about that pricing structure closer to the release of the generative AI capabilities. [ Felix ] has a question about what's the cost per license. [ Felix ], it really depends on the type of license that you need and the number of licenses that you have. Our cheapest license, I want to say, starts at $15 per user per month. The most expensive goes up much higher, but like any other enterprise software companies, there's discounting available to any kind of larger customers. I want to say there's -- you can buy the license directly, if you just want to do a small experiment or testing, on tableau.com today.

There are some requests as well to see live examples of Tableau Pulse and generative AI. I would highly encourage you all to schedule a demo with your Tableau representatives. They can create these tailored experiences for you all to make sure that we're answering your questions very directly and [ pointly ].

And there's also a lot of recorded "generative AI on Tableau" demos available on our website, so okay, when you go to Tableau Pulse's web page, you can stumble upon them, find them, but as Evan said, our sales teams are here to support you. And they have a lot of real-time live demos.

Are there a minimum number of licenses to get started was the question. No, there is not. It's just one. You can start very small, expand bigger, build out those use cases, et cetera.

Yes. And I want to say we have many customers who have more than 100,000 licenses. And that's the joy of Tableau Cloud. It's scalable. If you start today with one and anything you've done for just yourself, you can eventually use it with hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of your colleagues or friends because that's how Tableau Cloud scales. What you're getting is the same product that the 10 largest organizations in the world also use for their analytics needs, exactly the same.

Yes. Another question was regarding what features are within the Pulse beta. This is our first iteration of Pulse, so really what it is, is it's encompassing the personalized, contextual and smart features, so it's operationalizing actionable metrics. It is digestible insight summaries. It is metrics in the flow of your work as well as automated insights. That's really the basis for those features. We're very excited about it. And we would highly encourage you all to check it out via a demo as well. Are there plans to roll out generative AI features for server and -- for Tableau Server instances? That's a really good question. In general, we do want to lean into AI [ into ] Server where applicable. The challenges that presents itself is that we need to leverage a large language model. And in order to do that -- we can't ship a large language model with on-prem software. Tableau Server is a on-premise software version of Tableau Cloud, so at this time, we're still exploring that area, but we are focused on getting generative AI as -- out as fast as possible and it's coming to Tableau Cloud first.

But stay tuned for more. Because I don't want to say, we don't want to say Tableau Server is not going to get the latest innovation. We'll continue to invest in an incredible future for Tableau Server.

Absolutely...

[ Sydney ] has a question about how does -- they know the kind of account they have. I think that's a question for your account admin, about what kind of accounts you have. It's very difficult for us to give that guidance.

I see a question from [ Praveen ] about what type of data compliance features you have to use Tableau AI. I'm not quite following that question. I will say that our generative AI systems and LLM that we're plugging into is all via ethical use and so forth. And then the Tableau Cloud system itself has many compliance components, et cetera. I don't necessarily know the connection, so feel free to ask a follow-on here as to what you necessarily need.

I can take -- [ Isabel ] has a question about when will the gen AI features be available. Will there be a -- costs for additional fee? We are actively working on gen AI feature. They should be available as a beta in coming months. And we are still trying to test internally what the price structure will be. I don't want to promise either ways what exactly it could be, but there's a lot of exciting features and news coming your way.

There is a question from [ Jeff ]. "If our organization primarily uses desktop, how can we integrate our org transition to Tableau Cloud to maintain speed and gain the features of Pulse?" Tableau Desktop is really great from a analytical -- analysis component, but the -- we really find that most organizations benefit from the collaboration components of Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server. In this specific instance, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be using Tableau Desktop. Like still continue to use that for your analysis needs, et cetera, but I would encourage you all to publish that content to Tableau Cloud, leverage the creation of generative AI and Pulse so that, when you're viewing those analyses and those dashboards and it's refreshing, it's happening automatically in our collaboration platform. With Tableau...

I see a question -- sorry. Go ahead. Please go ahead, Evan.

I just wanted to add that, with Tableau Desktop, you can just sign in to your Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud and publish from there. You should have access to one or the other, depending on your [ licensing ].

Sorry to interrupt you there.

All good.

And next question is from [ Khansaliha ]. Can we access Tableau Pulse with student free license? So if you have a Tableau Cloud license of any kind -- it could be a student free license. It could be a trial. You can always go and sign up for a 2-week trial for free with an e-mail account. Any version of Tableau Cloud will have Pulse once it's generally available in the coming weeks. It does not matter what version you have. We will not be [ gating ] Tableau Pulse capabilities. As you heard us say, we believe Tableau Pulse is a transformative way of accessing data insights. And we want to make sure everybody can access it with ease.

There's a question from [ Felix ] regarding does Tableau Cloud conduct cybersecurity scans for security and protection of sensitive data. This is important to his firm which requires HIPAA compliance. We have an extremely rigorous and in-depth defense posture against any kinds of attacks, et cetera. In a lot of ways, we are leveraging the power of Salesforce behind us, the global leaders in cloud software, SaaS software. We are HIPAA compliant. We perform many audits and compliance restrictions, et cetera and data access controls. We have all of these in place so that we maintain all of our compliance certifications as well. You -- there are security white papers on our website, which I would highly encourage you all, but also feel free to reach out to your account manager. And they can dig into the details of what are the necessary needs for your organization.

Well, there's one more question from [ Roderick ]. Will we be showing a demo of our new AI features? Unfortunately, we don't have the time to do that today. I think this question was already asked. Like Evan mentioned earlier, there are 2 ways of seeing the demo of our new AI features. You can go to tableau.com. The home page should have very interesting features of recorded demos of our AI features, but you can also reach out to your Tableau representative or ask for help through tableau.com for a salesperson to help you set up with a live demo.

The next question is, if we start to train Pulse on our sensitive company data, will we be able to protect our IP so that the generative part of the AI won't leak our knowledge to other companies? It's my understanding that our large language models do not train on customer data, so that shouldn't be an issue there. It's it looks at the metadata in order to provide you all insights, but your data does not train or impact anything of our ability to consistently provide you all with insights.

Another way of putting that is the way we leverage generative AI is your data does not go to any server which is storing data. So we do not store or leverage customer data for any of generative AI. You are using your data. The server runs it and then deletes it. It's never stored. It's never kept. It does not go to any LLM provider. It does not stay with Salesforce. It's your data. We respect your security and privacy. You're getting the value from it, but that's it. Your data remains your data, and that's the Salesforce promise. I do want to say this is an incredible audience. I -- this is definitely not my first webinar, but you guys have broken all records of the number of questions asked in a webinar with me. I'm grateful for this interactivity. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I'm grateful for the time that I spent in engaging. Clearly there's lots of excitement about Tableau Pulse. You guys would love to see more demos. You would -- and understand the pricing more. I've taken this feedback loud and clear, so in the coming webinars, we would love to do that. We would love to do more demos of our AI capabilities, our generative AI road map and what the pricing looks like because I think that's what the audience demands. Thank you for that. Evan, any last words before we wrap up for the day?

I think that's it. Thank you all so much. I mean you said it pretty eloquently. Really appreciate the engagement here. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy days to join us.

Thank you.

Take care, everyone.