The "Dallas" information marketplace
Today I'm here in Washington DC, demo-ing in Bob Muglia's keynote at our Worldwide Partner Conference. This time, I'm showing something quite new - not just a new product, but a new concept in data - Microsoft's premium information marketplace codenamed "Dallas."
"Dallas" may be better known as a village of 200 or so people in northern Scotland, but now it has a new claim to fame. "Dallas" is a place where developers on any platform as well as information workers can find data from commercial content providers as well as public domain data. They can consume this data and construct new BI scenarios and new apps…
To illustrate how easy it will be for ISVs to integrate this content into their apps and to showcase a BI scenario, in the keynote demo I'll be using United Nations data from "Dallas" integrated in an early build of Tableau Software's solution to create a visualization answering study abroad trends around the world. This took only a few minutes to create using "Dallas" and Tableau Public.
To break down the demo, here are the three key pillars behind this scenario:
Discover Data of All Types
Microsoft Codename "Dallas" makes data very easy to find and consume. The vision is to be able to post and access any data set, including rich metadata, using a common format.
Explore and Consume
Using Tableau and "Dallas" together means you can explore any data set simply by dragging and dropping fields to visualize it. This is a very powerful idea: anyone can easily explore and understand data without doing any programming.
Publish and Share
Once you've found a story in your data you want to share it... Using Tableau Public you can embed a live visualization in your blog, just like the one above.
"Dallas" creates a lot of opportunities for a company like Tableau. It makes it possible for bloggers, interested citizens and journalists to more easily find public data and tell important stories, creating a true information democracy. "Dallas" also makes it easier for Tableau's corporate customers to find relevant data to mash up with their own company data, making Tableau's corporate tools that much more compelling.
For more information on how you can be a provider or how an ISV can plug into the Dallas partnership opportunities, send mail to DallasBD@Microsoft.com.