Tableau Server vs. TARGIT

Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.

Incentivized

Overall, TARGIT is a valuable tool, and more and more associates are realizing this every day. It's become our standard for sales reporting. I would recommend the software for use at other companies, and I often encourage fellow associates to gain access and basic training.

Incentivized

• It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
• Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
• Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server

Incentivized

• The in-memory cube in the Targit suite is an excellent tool that can replace SSAS in theMicrosoft BI suite of tools. InMemory aggregations are lightning-fast compared to Microsoft SSAS.
• Targit also has a cool HTML5 reporting tool.
• It is a complete suite of BI tools including ETL, cube and reports.

Incentivized

• While it took little time for our data analysts to crank out visualizations, it did take some time(longer than I expected) for our technology operations team to configure the server to share the sizes.
• The server update process is rather cumbersome -- requires a full uninstall/re-install.
• Again, while it took our data analysts next to no time to start creating, I've been in other organizations that have struggled with the feature-rich interface and complexity of the Tableau client. So, it requires the right personnel, with dedicated time, to fully leverage the tool.

Incentivized

• I think including the Data Discovery module in the base package instead of charging extra for it would go a long way to making the software better. If you don't have much background with SSIS or SSAS and you do not buy the module, it will be difficult for you to add or modify data sources.
• There are a couple small tweaks to the interface that would be helpful but are far from necessary. For example, unlike an Excel pivot table, you cannot move the measures above the dimensions in a table interface. There are workarounds for this, however.
• I understand the need to make their calculation language as complex as it is, but it still seems like it could be made simpler. It's helpful that it comes with several standard calculations that you can easily add to an object, but if you want to modify a calculation or create your own, it can be more complicated than I would like.

Incentivized

It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.

Incentivized

The use of Targit is widespread throughout our organization. Our users are becoming comfortable with the tool and Targit has allowed our company to truly grasp the concept of Business Intelligence and making better business decisions through the analysis of our data. Our users are not waiting for IT to create reports for them, they have full rich self-service BI with Targit and are able to turn a great analytical idea or ad-hoc query hypothesis into concrete answers with actionable responses within minutes.

User experience is the most important factor to consider whenever considering capabilities for non-technical business users. If the learning curve is so steep business users must be advanced users to be productive, you hit the wall of diminishing returns, this is exceptionally true when it comes to analyzing data. Transforming data analysts into BI development experts shifts the focus of the analyst from analyzing data to mastering software. Tableau does a masterful job at minimizing the technology and maximizing the users understanding of their data.

Everything on the back end needs to be correct, which sometimes it may not be set up or missing some variables. Some of the more difficult parts of Targit require a lot more attention and object creation to work properly

Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues

While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.

I think the folks that work in support are generally pretty good at what they do (when you get them on a WebEx). But the process of reporting issues to them and waiting for a response (via email only) is a hassle. I never understood why you can't just call them up and discuss the issues with them. It would take a handful of email exchanges before they would agree to a WebEx session. That was frustrating.

Everyone I've dealt with at Targit genuinely cares about me and my success, and they respond to questions quickly and accurately. There is literally nothing more I could ask for from their support.

Incentivized

In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.

The sales consultants do an amazing job of introducing the tool and its capabilities. They are also helpful in explaining the layout of the desktop client and its different functionality. Keep in mind that they use a sample data source (MS Excel) with a very small amount of data to show off what it can do. What you have to remember is that you are buying the tool so that you can connect to large amounts of data (and possibly blend data together from different databases).

Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either

Make sure all of the back end work is done prior to getting Targit set up. Every variable you may need for calculations needs to be correct and every item needs to be uniform so it is read properly.

Looker and Tableau are quite similar products. I think Tableau's ability to view data visually is more comprehensive. The different breakdowns in UTM level versus first touch and last touch are shown in a visual format, making it much easier to view and interpret the results. Tableau also has faster load times compared to Looker for larger datasets.

Incentivized

While their product is top of the line and works very well for us, we ultimately selected Targit because of their team. We love working with them and they are always super helpful. Whenever we have a request or issue, they are there ready to happily help us resolve it and move forward.

• Tableau Server has had a huge positive impact. It has allowed us to quickly distribute complex dashboards across the company
• Tableau Server has allowed us to easily manage our entire employee base at the company and control the dashboards they view and interact with

Incentivized

• It really has answered questions during decision-making conversations where a task item would have been created with days of turnaround time instead of getting the necessary information within minutes during that same conversation.
• Unified Reporting that maintains in alignment with business needs.

Incentivized