History
The company traces its roots to academic research in Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science between 1997 and 2002. Professor Pat Hanrahan led research in the use of table-based displays to browse multidimensional relational databases along with his Ph.D. student Chris Stolte who specialized in visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing relational databases and data cubes. Together, they combined a structured query language for databases with a descriptive language for rendering graphics and invented a database visualization language called VizQL (Visual Query Language). VizQL formed the core of the Polaris system, an interface for exploring large multi-dimensional databases. In 2003, after Stolte recruited his former business partner and friend, Christian Chabot, to serve as CEO, Tableau was spun out of Stanford with an eponymous software application. The product queries relational databases, cubes, cloud database and spreadsheets, and generates a number of graph types that can be combined into dashboards and shared over a computer network or the internet.
In 2010, Tableau reported revenue of $34.2 million dollars. That figure grew to $62.4 million in 2011 and $127.7 million in 2012. Profit during the same periods came to $2.7 million, $3.4 million and $1.6 million, respectively. Shares of Tableau Software started trading on the New York Stock Exchange after an initial public offering on May 17, 2013.
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