“The third cornerstone of digital transformation is the analytics and the visualization and the business intelligence to see everything in your company,” says Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. “There’s no more amazing company in that category then Tableau whose mission is to make sure that the world can see and understand data. This is just going to be an incredible acquisition for Salesforce. It’s really the best of both worlds, two amazing companies coming together.”

Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses their transformative $15.3 billion deal for Tableau, in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations

There are really three cornerstones of digital transformation. The first one is the customer. Of course, we do that in spades. We do that better than anybody else. The second cornerstone, we did that a year ago with MuleSoft integration. The ability to integrate all your data sources together so you can get a more holistic view or what we call Customer 360. But you’re really touching on the third cornerstone of digital transformation, which is the analytics and the visualization and the business intelligence to see everything in your company. There’s no more amazing company in that category then Tableau whose mission is to make sure that the world can see and understand data. That is what excites us as well.

I was in Minneapolis just last week. When I was with one of our very largest customers, they’re doing some incredible work with their supply chain and the ability to connect with their customer in a whole new way. Of course, that’s what we do for them. But at the very end of the meeting, they’re talking about how they’re going to visualize and provide analytics and business intelligence on this incredible infrastructure that we’ve helped them build. They had chosen Tableau. Then, of course, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, wow, this is just going to be an incredible acquisition for Salesforce. It’s really the best of both worlds, two amazing companies coming together. Tableau is a company at scale. It’s an incredible company and putting that together with Salesforce just supercharges both of our organizations.

Tableau Didn’t Want Our Cash, They Wanted Our Equity

In terms of cash flow, I don’t know if you remember our quarter that we just announced last week but we had record cash flows. We’ve had phenomenal cash generation. Our business has done a great job in cash. But I have to be honest, Tableau didn’t want our cash. They wanted our equity. They know that the real value here is in the company that we’re creating together. We would have been more than happy to give them any currency they wanted but ultimately they want our stock.

Hey, I can’t blame them. Look at how it’s performed over the last decade. It’s been incredible. I have a huge vision and so do they on what’s possible for the future. When you look at that we’re really looking at a company that’s going to fast track to $30 billion in revenue in enterprise software and there just isn’t very many of those companies out there today.

We Can’t Build the Technolgy Fast Enough

I’m a huge believer in innovation. It’s one of our core values. Our four core values; trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. Let me just talk about innovation for a second. I so strongly believe in not just organic innovation, and you’ve seen that of course, our core Sales Cloud, our core Service Cloud, and our core platform, but I also strongly believe that companies to be competitive and successful today have to also believe in inorganic innovation. You don’t have to look any farther than things like our Marketing Cloud or Commerce Cloud and our Integration Cloud as well. In these technologies, we were able to acquire great companies like ExactTarget, like Demandware, and like MuleSoft, that became the heart of our Customer 360.

We can’t build the technology fast enough to be able to deliver to our customers demand.  Now by doing that (acquisition of Tableau) we are able to create this complete Customer 360 platform that gives our customers everything they do to not only connect with their customer in a whole new way, not only to connect with every data source they have but also to be able to have the visualization data analytics and business intelligence to achieve their total success. For digital transformation, which is what’s happening right now, that is mission critical.