Gigabit January 2019

DIGITAL STRATEGY
36
He may have just touched down in London
after a transatlantic flight, but Tableau Software’s
President and CEO, Adam Selipsky,
is feeling energised. He’s made the journey not long
after Tableau’s annual conference in New Orleans
— an electrifying get-together of self-confessed
data-geeks, who are invested in what the data analytics
and visualisation firm has got up its sleeve. “It’s
not really like any other tech conference,” Selipsky
says, “You almost have to be there to really understand
it; the level of excitement and passion is incredible.
It’s not just a gathering of technology people,
it’s really a community coming together.”
To say that Tableau has a strong fan base would
be an understatement – and it has the numbers to
back this claim. Over 17,000 customers and
partners came to its conference in New Orleans
and today, the firm claims to have over 50,000
customer accounts. It also won over the backing
of Selipsky, who joined the firm just two years ago.
Before that, he had his made his mark at Amazon
Web Services (AWS), helping to grow the enterprise
from a startup to a multi-billion-dollar business and
a leader in cloud computing. “I think AWS taught me
a lot about how to scale a company,” he reflects.
“The product needs to work differently at scale, the
way you communicate internally needs to work
differently to scale, the way that you interact with
your customers and who your customers are changes
as you grow, particularly if you’re growing rapidly.”
Spending over a decade at AWS, Selipsky made
JANUARY 2019