SiliconANGLE theCube hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly kicked off this year’s Tableau Customer Conference by drilling down into the dynamics that helped the data visualization firm get to where it is today.

Dave highlights that Tableau is a $200 million company with a $4 billion market cap. The vendor recorded a compound annual growth rate of 93 percent between 2010 and 2013, a massive increase that he credits to the fact that its software is not limited to one particular platform.

Tableau’s solutions helps organizations make sense of their massive data troves by putting the power of analytics at the fingertips of business users. Historically, data-driven insights were not nearly as easily accessible. Jeff reflects that decision makers had to turn to their IT organizations for a custom dashboard that would take weeks or even months to roll out, a pain point that Tableau eliminates by providing users with the means to integrate and analyze datasets on their own.

The company’s offering is similar to that of QlikView, a Radnor, Pennsylvania-based provider of business intelligence software. The two companies are fierce competitors, but Jeff explains to Dave that “what they’re really competing against are the incumbent business intelligence players – SAP Business Intelligence, IBM Cognos and others – who really have a very strong foothold in the enterprise, but they take a much more IT-led [approach to] business intelligence.”

Jeff names ease of use as the feature that sets Tableau’s software apart from mainstream BI tools such as Excel. From a customer standpoint, the company’s offering gives users the ability to explore data more interactively than any other solution.

See the video below for the full discussion, including more on the importance of visualization for effective Big Data analytics.