It’s no secret that Tableau Software is popular with end-users, many of whom surreptitiously download the self-service data visualization software onto their desktops without notifying IT.

But, as an attendee at Tableau’s user conference put it to me, most users and even IT look at Tableau’s software as “a toy, not a tool.” That’s a perception the company must shed if it is to continue its staggering growth trajectory (the company nearly doubled revenue in 2011 over the previous year, topping $70 million in sales) and expand to enterprise-wide deployments.

The company has taken a number of steps to do just that with the release of Tableau 7, which hit the market last week. In addition to adding powerful new data visualizations and enhancing its geolocation capabilities, the latest version of the company’s core platform also includes several new enterprise-class features that could go along way in wooing skeptical IT departments and CIOS.

I recently spoke with Francois Ajenstat, who oversaw development of Tableau 7, about the new enterprise-class features. They include:

• The new Tableau Data Server is essentially a centralized metadata store where administrators and/or users can publish reusable data extracts and database connections.
• This allows administrators or users to configure connections to Hadoop clusters or analytic databases that other users can access without needing to understand the underlying complexity.
• Alternately, data can be loaded in-memory and accessed by users via the Tableau Data Server.
• The Data Server ensures users are all working off common data definitions and gives IT control over who has access to which data sources.
• Tableau 7 supports multi-tenancy deployments giving administrators the ability to slice servers across multiple tenants to ensure better hardware efficiency, security and access controls.

Tableau Data Server; Source: Tableau Software

These enterprise-class additions are key for Tableau if it wants to land enterprise-wide deployment deals. The company is in good stead with Ajenstat, who previously oversaw product development of Microsoft’s SQL Server.