Tableau Cost Vs Opportunity

Its been more than three years of my fantastic relationship with Tableau, nothing short of a 'love-affair'. Having worked on other BI tools earlier including Eclipse BIRT, OBIEE, Cognos, Hyperion and Microstrategy over the last 10 years of my IT career run; was swept off my feet when i first used Tableau to create Visualizations and BI Reports!

Tableau has a few core strengths that allows:

1. Self-Serve BI to IT development 'non-savvy' Business/Functional SMEs
2. Easy to create BI Visualizations by mere drag-and-drop (SQL queries get built by the tool internally)
3. Complex statistical calculations (like Bell-Curve, Trend, Correlation, Forecasting) within a few clicks
4.  Run-time calculation of complex business logic on the presentation layer without detrimentally affecting performance 
5. Published reports to be presented across devices (PDAs/Monitors/LCD TVs), printable and shareable as image exports/PDFs. The data under the hood could be exported to CSV for more traditional 'Excel' savvy users
6. Fast run-time query on VizQL, data compression, incremental refresh of extracts enable users to massage and render TeraByte(s) of data on an actionable, visually rich dashboard

The way i look at it, the best people to build reports are leaders and owners of the data. Why?

• The data experts know their data best (relationships, correlation between KPIs and metrics)
• Leaders know the past business direction, BI reports serve as a feedback loop helping them make informed business decisions based on past observations

Think about it, if an organization could empower their data experts/SMEs and leaders to prepare reports when they needed BI the most (not having to wait for IT to condition data and build reports) how effective would that business model be? How proactive and dynamic would the informed decisions be? The Tableau license fee is a mere cost-to-opportunity with a massive ROI.

'Lets make data beautiful' and chose to live in an informed, capable and 'quick-n-easy-anybody-can-build' BI savvy world!