2011 was a good year for Tableau Software. The Seattle-based company today reported it nearly doubled sales last year, posting a 94% increase over 2010 sales figures.

In Q4 2011, sales increased 104% over Q4 2010. The private company did not put a number on overall sales, but by my accounting Tableau did around $40 million in revenue in 2010. That should put 2011 revenue somewhere between $75 and $80 million.

Tableau began life as a data visualization specialist with its lightweight in-memory visualization tools that end-users could easily deploy and use without IT help. In fact, avoiding the IT/business intelligence bottleneck was one if its key selling points.

The company later released Tableau Public, a free cloud-based service that lets anyone upload, visualize and publish limited amounts of data, has proved extremely popular with media companies. And Tableau is the chosen visualization tool of a growing number of Data Scientists.

Having conquered the desktop, Tableau now has its sights on the enterprise market. It recently introduced Tableau Server, an enterprise version of the platform with improved management and administrative controls, in an effort to land larger, company-wide deals. Tableau recently named a new Director of Channel, Suzanne Hoffman, to expand its partner program.

According to the company, more than 7,000 organizations use Tableau, though it didn’t say how many of those were paying customers versus Tableau Public users. Still, doubling year-over-year sales is nothing to sneeze at. Incumbant BI players SAP, IBM and Oracle beware.