Galaxy Fold launch date will be announced in ‘coming weeks’

May has come and gone, and we’re nearly halfway done with June. All we seem to really know about the Galaxy Fold, on the other hand is that it’s still coming…at some point. In a comment earlier today, Samsung promised a launch date for the delayed foldable “in the coming weeks.” It’s a familiar refrain at this point, of course.

Initially planned for an April 26 launch, the hardware giant hit pause on the device after multiple problems were reported among a small batch of review units. Samsung initially placed the blame for display problems on reviews, but ultimately announced it was going back to the drawing board.

A month and half after the promised launched, we’ll still no closer to knowing the new date. It’s not a great look for Samsung, but it’s a hell of a lot better than subjecting the product to a pair of recalls a la the Galaxy Note. It’s a new category based around a new technology, so one ultimately can’t blame Samsung for being cautious here. Of course, the case could certainly be made that these sort of precautions would have been better to take prior to putting these out in the wild, but here we are.

Reviewers aren’t supposed to serve as beta testers, but the company is probably better off getting these issues out of the way before wider release.

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An Apple a Day

An Apple a Day

Qubole launches Quantum, its serverless database engine

Qubole, the data platform founded by Apache Hive creator and former head of Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team Ashish Thusoo, today announced the launch of Quantum, its first serverless offering.

Qubole may not necessarily be a household name, but its customers include the likes of Autodesk, Comcast, Lyft, Nextdoor and Zillow. For these users, Qubole has long offered a self-service platform that allowed their data scientists and engineers to build their AI, machine learning and analytics workflows on the public cloud of their choice. The platform sits on top of open-source technologies like Apache Spark, Presto and Kafka, for example.

Typically, enterprises have to provision a considerable amount of resources to give these platforms the resources they need. These resources often go unused and the infrastructure can quickly become complex.

Qubole already abstracts most of this away and offering what is essentially a serverless platform. With Quantum, however, it is going a step further by launching a high-performance serverless SQP engine that allows users to query petabytes of data with nothing else by ANSI-SQL, given them the choice between using a Presto cluster or a serverless SQL engine to run their queries, for example.

The data can be stored on AWS, Azure, Google cloud or Oracle Cloud and users won’t have to set up a second data lake or move their data to another platform to use the SQL engine. Quantum automatically scales up or down as needed, of course, and users can still work with the same metastore for their data, no matter whether they choose the clustered or serverless option. Indeed, Quantum is essentially just another SQL engine without Qubole’s overall suite of engines.

Typically, Qubole charges enterprises by compute minutes. When using Quantum, the company uses the same metric, but enterprises pay for the execution time of the query. “So instead of the Qubole compute units being associated with the number of minutes the cluster was up and running, it is associated with the Qubole compute units consumed by that particular query or that particular workload, which is even more fine-grained ” Thusoo explained. “This works really well when you have to do interactive workloads.”

Thusoo notes that Quantum is targeted at analysts who often need to perform interactive queries on data stored in object stores. Qubole integrates with services like Tableau and Looker (which Google is now in the process of acquiring). “They suddenly get access to very elastic compute capacity, but they are able to come through a very familiar user interface,” Thusoo noted.

 

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With Tableau and Mulesoft, Salesforce gains full view of enterprise data

Back in the 2010 timeframe, it was common to say that content was king, but after watching Google buy Looker for $2.6 billion last week and Salesforce nab Tableau for $15.7 billion this morning, it’s clear that data has ascended to the throne in a business context.

We have been hearing about Big Data for years, but we’ve probably reached a point in 2019 where the data onslaught is really having an impact on business. If you can find the key data nuggets in the big data pile, it can clearly be a competitive advantage, and companies like Google and Salesforce are pulling out their checkbooks to make sure they are in a position to help you out.

While Google, as a cloud infrastructure vendor, is trying to help companies on its platform and across the cloud understand and visualize all that data, Salesforce as a SaaS vendor might have a different reason — one that might surprise you — given that Salesforce was born in the cloud. But perhaps it recognizes something fundamental. If it truly wants to own the enterprise, it has to have a hybrid story, and with Mulesoft and Tableau, that’s precisely what it has — and why it was willing to spend around $23 billion to get it.

Making connections

Certainly, Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff has no trouble seeing the connections between his two big purchases over the last year. He sees the combination of Mulesoft connecting to the data sources and Tableau providing a way to visualize as a “beautiful thing.”

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Google at ICML 2019

Posted by Andrew Helton, Editor, Google AI Communications

Machine learning is a key strategic focus at Google, with highly active groups pursuing research in virtually all aspects of the field, including deep learning and more classical algorithms, exploring theory as well as application. We utilize scalable tools and architectures to build machine learning systems that enable us to solve deep scientific and engineering challenges in areas of language, speech, translation, music, visual processing and more.

As a leader in machine learning research, Google is proud to be a Sapphire Sponsor of the thirty-sixth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2019), a premier annual event supported by the International Machine Learning Society taking place this week in Long Beach, CA. With nearly 200 Googlers attending the conference to present publications and host workshops, we look forward to our continued collaboration with the larger machine learning research community.

If you're attending ICML 2019, we hope you'll visit the Google booth to learn more about the exciting work, creativity and fun that goes into solving some of the field's most interesting challenges, with researchers on hand to talk about Google Research Football Environment, AdaNet, Robotics at Google and much more. You can learn more about the Google research being presented at ICML 2019 in the list below (Google affiliations highlighted in blue).

ICML 2019 Committees
Board Members include: Andrew McCallum, Corinna Cortes, Hugo Larochelle, William Cohen (Emeritus)

Senior Area Chairs include: Charles Sutton, Claudio Gentile, Corinna Cortes, Kevin Murphy, Mehryar Mohri, Nati Srebro, Samy Bengio, Surya Ganguli

Area Chairs include: Jacob Abernethy, William Cohen, Dumitru Erhan, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine, Manzil Zaheer, Sergei Vassilvitskii, Boqing Gong, Been Kim, Dale Schuurmans, Danny Tarlow, Dustin Tran, Hanie Sedghi, Honglak Lee, Jasper Snoek, Lihong Li, Minmin Chen, Mohammad Norouzi, Nicolas Le Roux, Phil Long, Sanmi Koyejo, Timnit Gebru, Vitaly Feldman, Satyen Kale, Katherine Heller, Hossein Mobahi, Amir Globerson, Ilya Tolstikhin, Marco Cuturi, Sebastian Nowozin, Amin Karbasi, Ohad Shamir, Graham Taylor

Accepted Publications
Learning to Groove with Inverse Sequence Transformations
Jon Gillick, Adam Roberts, Jesse Engel, Douglas Eck, David Bamman

Metric-Optimized Example Weights
Sen Zhao, Mahdi Milani Fard, Harikrishna Narasimhan, Maya Gupta

HOList: An Environment for Machine Learning of Higher Order Logic Theorem Proving
Kshitij Bansal, Sarah Loos, Markus Rabe, Christian Szegedy, Stewart Wilcox

Learning to Clear the Market
Weiran Shen, Sebastien Lahaie, Renato Paes Leme

Shape Constraints for Set Functions
Andrew Cotter, Maya Gupta, Heinrich Jiang, Erez Louidor, James Muller, Tamann Narayan, Serena Wang, Tao Zhu

Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks
Han Zhang, Ian Goodfellow, Dimitris Metaxas, Augustus Odena

High-Fidelity Image Generation With Fewer Labels
Mario Lučić, Michael Tschannen, Marvin Ritter, Xiaohua Zhai, Olivier Bachem, Sylvain Gelly

Learning Optimal Linear Regularizers
Matthew Streeter

DeepMDP: Learning Continuous Latent Space Models for Representation Learning
Carles Gelada, Saurabh Kumar, Jacob Buckman, Ofir Nachum, Marc G. Bellemare

kernelPSI: a Post-Selection Inference Framework for Nonlinear Variable Selection
Lotfi Slim, Clément Chatelain, Chloe-Agathe Azencott, Jean-Philippe Vert

Learning from a Learner
Alexis Jacq, Matthieu Geist, Ana Paiva, Olivier Pietquin

Rate Distortion For Model Compression:From Theory To Practice
Weihao Gao, Yu-Han Liu, Chong Wang, Sewoong Oh

An Investigation into Neural Net Optimization via Hessian Eigenvalue Density
Behrooz Ghorbani, Shankar Krishnan, Ying Xiao

Graph Matching Networks for Learning the Similarity of Graph Structured Objects
Yujia Li, Chenjie Gu, Thomas Dullien, Oriol Vinyals, Pushmeet Kohli

Subspace Robust Wasserstein Distances
François-Pierre Paty, Marco Cuturi

Training Well-Generalizing Classifiers for Fairness Metrics and Other Data-Dependent Constraints
Andrew Cotter, Maya Gupta, Heinrich Jiang, Nathan Srebro, Karthik Sridharan, Serena Wang, Blake Woodworth, Seungil You

The Effect of Network Width on Stochastic Gradient Descent and Generalization: an Empirical Study
Daniel Park, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Quoc Le, Samuel Smith

A Theory of Regularized Markov Decision Processes
Matthieu Geist, Bruno Scherrer, Olivier Pietquin

Area Attention
Yang Li, Łukasz Kaiser, Samy Bengio, Si Si

EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks
Mingxing Tan, Quoc Le

Static Automatic Batching In TensorFlow
Ashish Agarwal

The Evolved Transformer
David So, Quoc Le, Chen Liang

Policy Certificates: Towards Accountable Reinforcement Learning
Christoph Dann, Lihong Li, Wei Wei, Emma Brunskill

Self-similar Epochs: Value in Arrangement
Eliav Buchnik, Edith Cohen, Avinatan Hasidim, Yossi Matias

The Value Function Polytope in Reinforcement Learning
Robert Dadashi, Marc G. Bellemare, Adrien Ali Taiga, Nicolas Le Roux, Dale Schuurmans

Adversarial Examples Are a Natural Consequence of Test Error in Noise
Justin Gilmer, Nicolas Ford, Nicholas Carlini, Ekin Cubuk

SOLAR: Deep Structured Representations for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Marvin Zhang, Sharad Vikram, Laura Smith, Pieter Abbeel, Matthew Johnson, Sergey Levine

Garbage In, Reward Out: Bootstrapping Exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits
Branislav Kveton, Csaba Szepesvari, Sharan Vaswani, Zheng Wen, Tor Lattimore, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Imperceptible, Robust, and Targeted Adversarial Examples for Automatic Speech Recognition
Yao Qin, Nicholas Carlini, Garrison Cottrell, Ian Goodfellow, Colin Raffel

Direct Uncertainty Prediction for Medical Second Opinions
Maithra Raghu, Katy Blumer, Rory Sayres, Ziad Obermeyer, Bobby Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jon Kleinberg

A Large-Scale Study on Regularization and Normalization in GANs
Karol Kurach, Mario Lučić, Xiaohua Zhai, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly

Learning a Compressed Sensing Measurement Matrix via Gradient Unrolling
Shanshan Wu, Alex Dimakis, Sujay Sanghavi, Felix Yu, Daniel Holtmann-Rice, Dmitry Storcheus, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Sanjiv Kumar

NATTACK: Learning the Distributions of Adversarial Examples for an Improved Black-Box Attack on Deep Neural Networks
Yandong Li, Lijun Li, Liqiang Wang, Tong Zhang, Boqing Gong

Distributed Weighted Matching via Randomized Composable Coresets
Sepehr Assadi, Mohammad Hossein Bateni, Vahab Mirrokni

Monge blunts Bayes: Hardness Results for Adversarial Training
Zac Cranko, Aditya Menon, Richard Nock, Cheng Soon Ong, Zhan Shi, Christian Walder

Generalized Majorization-Minimization
Sobhan Naderi Parizi, Kun He, Reza Aghajani, Stan Sclaroff, Pedro Felzenszwalb

NAS-Bench-101: Towards Reproducible Neural Architecture Search
Chris Ying, Aaron Klein, Eric Christiansen, Esteban Real, Kevin Murphy, Frank Hutter

Variational Russian Roulette for Deep Bayesian Nonparametrics
Kai Xu, Akash Srivastava, Charles Sutton

Surrogate Losses for Online Learning of Stepsizes in Stochastic Non-Convex Optimization
Zhenxun Zhuang, Ashok Cutkosky, Francesco Orabona

Improved Parallel Algorithms for Density-Based Network Clustering
Mohsen Ghaffari, Silvio Lattanzi, Slobodan Mitrović

The Advantages of Multiple Classes for Reducing Overfitting from Test Set Reuse
Vitaly Feldman, Roy Frostig, Moritz Hardt

Submodular Streaming in All Its Glory: Tight Approximation, Minimum Memory and Low Adaptive Complexity
Ehsan Kazemi, Marko Mitrovic, Morteza Zadimoghaddam, Silvio Lattanzi, Amin Karbasi

Hiring Under Uncertainty
Manish Purohit, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Manish Raghavan

A Tree-Based Method for Fast Repeated Sampling of Determinantal Point Processes
Jennifer Gillenwater, Alex Kulesza, Zelda Mariet, Sergei Vassilvtiskii

Statistics and Samples in Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Mark Rowland, Robert Dadashi, Saurabh Kumar, Remi Munos, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney

Provably Efficient Maximum Entropy Exploration
Elad Hazan, Sham Kakade, Karan Singh, Abby Van Soest

Active Learning with Disagreement Graphs
Corinna Cortes, Giulia DeSalvo,, Mehryar Mohri, Ningshan Zhang, Claudio Gentile

MixHop: Higher-Order Graph Convolutional Architectures via Sparsified Neighborhood Mixing
Sami Abu-El-Haija, Bryan Perozzi, Amol Kapoor, Nazanin Alipourfard, Kristina Lerman, Hrayr Harutyunyan, Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan

Understanding the Impact of Entropy on Policy Optimization
Zafarali Ahmed, Nicolas Le Roux, Mohammad Norouzi, Dale Schuurmans

Matrix-Free Preconditioning in Online Learning
Ashok Cutkosky, Tamas Sarlos

State-Reification Networks: Improving Generalization by Modeling the Distribution of Hidden Representations
Alex Lamb, Jonathan Binas, Anirudh Goyal, Sandeep Subramanian, Ioannis Mitliagkas, Yoshua Bengio, Michael Mozer

Online Convex Optimization in Adversarial Markov Decision Processes
Aviv Rosenberg, Yishay Mansour

Bounding User Contributions: A Bias-Variance Trade-off in Differential Privacy
Kareem Amin, Alex Kulesza, Andres Munoz Medina, Sergei Vassilvtiskii

Complementary-Label Learning for Arbitrary Losses and Models
Takashi Ishida, Gang Niu, Aditya Menon, Masashi Sugiyama

Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels
Danijar Hafner, Timothy Lillicrap, Ian Fischer, Ruben Villegas, David Ha, Honglak Lee, James Davidson

Unifying Orthogonal Monte Carlo Methods
Krzysztof Choromanski, Mark Rowland, Wenyu Chen, Adrian Weller

Differentially Private Learning of Geometric Concepts
Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Yossi Matias, Uri Stemmer

Online Learning with Sleeping Experts and Feedback Graphs
Corinna Cortes, Giulia DeSalvo, Claudio Gentile, Mehryar Mohri, Scott Yang

Adaptive Scale-Invariant Online Algorithms for Learning Linear Models
Michal Kempka, Wojciech Kotlowski, Manfred K. Warmuth

TensorFuzz: Debugging Neural Networks with Coverage-Guided Fuzzing
Augustus Odena, Catherine Olsson, David Andersen, Ian Goodfellow

Online Control with Adversarial Disturbances
Naman Agarwal, Brian Bullins, Elad Hazan, Sham Kakade, Karan Singh

Adversarial Online Learning with Noise
Alon Resler, Yishay Mansour

Escaping Saddle Points with Adaptive Gradient Methods
Matthew Staib, Sashank Reddi, Satyen Kale, Sanjiv Kumar, Suvrit Sra

Fairness Risk Measures
Robert Williamson, Aditya Menon

DBSCAN++: Towards Fast and Scalable Density Clustering
Jennifer Jang, Heinrich Jiang

Learning Linear-Quadratic Regulators Efficiently with only √T Regret
Alon Cohen, Tomer Koren, Yishay Mansour

Understanding and correcting pathologies in the training of learned optimizers
Luke Metz, Niru Maheswaranathan, Jeremy Nixon, Daniel Freeman, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP
Neil Houlsby, Andrei Giurgiu, Stanislaw Jastrzebski, Bruna Morrone, Quentin De Laroussilhe, Andrea Gesmundo, Mona Attariyan, Sylvain Gelly

Efficient Full-Matrix Adaptive Regularization
Naman Agarwal, Brian Bullins, Xinyi Chen, Elad Hazan, Karan Singh, Cyril Zhang, Yi Zhang

Efficient On-Device Models Using Neural Projections
Sujith Ravi

Flexibly Fair Representation Learning by Disentanglement
Elliot Creager, David Madras, Joern-Henrik Jacobsen, Marissa Weis, Kevin Swersky, Toniann Pitassi, Richard Zemel

Recursive Sketches for Modular Deep Learning
Badih Ghazi, Rina Panigrahy, Joshua Wang

POLITEX: Regret Bounds for Policy Iteration Using Expert Prediction
Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori, Peter L. Bartlett, Kush Bhatia, Nevena Lazić, Csaba Szepesvári, Gellért Weisz

Anytime Online-to-Batch, Optimism and Acceleration
Ashok Cutkosky

Insertion Transformer: Flexible Sequence Generation via Insertion Operations
Mitchell Stern, William Chan, Jamie Kiros, Jakob Uszkoreit

Robust Inference via Generative Classifiers for Handling Noisy Labels
Kimin Lee, Sukmin Yun, Kibok Lee, Honglak Lee, Bo Li, Jinwoo Shin

A Better k-means++ Algorithm via Local Search
Silvio Lattanzi, Christian Sohler

Analyzing and Improving Representations with the Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss
Nicholas Frosst, Nicolas Papernot, Geoffrey Hinton

Learning to Generalize from Sparse and Underspecified Rewards
Rishabh Agarwal, Chen Liang, Dale Schuurmans, Mohammad Norouzi

MeanSum: A Neural Model for Unsupervised Multi-Document Abstractive Summarization
Eric Chu, Peter Liu

CHiVE: Varying Prosody in Speech Synthesis with a Linguistically Driven Dynamic Hierarchical Conditional Variational Network
Tom Kenter, Vincent Wan, Chun-An Chan, Rob Clark, Jakub Vit

Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited
Simon Kornblith, Mohammad Norouzi, Honglak Lee, Geoffrey Hinton

Online Algorithms for Rent-Or-Buy with Expert Advice
Sreenivas Gollapudi, Debmalya Panigrahi

Breaking the Softmax Bottleneck via Learnable Monotonic Pointwise Non-linearities
Octavian Ganea, Sylvain Gelly, Gary Becigneul, Aliaksei Severyn

Non-monotone Submodular Maximization with Nearly Optimal Adaptivity and Query Complexity
Matthew Fahrbach, Vahab Mirrokni, Morteza Zadimoghaddam

Agnostic Federated Learning
Mehryar Mohri, Gary Sivek, Ananda Theertha Suresh

Categorical Feature Compression via Submodular Optimization
Mohammad Hossein Bateni, Lin Chen, Hossein Esfandiari, Thomas Fu, Vahab Mirrokni, Afshin Rostamizadeh

Cross-Domain 3D Equivariant Image Embeddings
Carlos Esteves, Avneesh Sud, Zhengyi Luo, Kostas Daniilidis, Ameesh Makadia

Faster Algorithms for Binary Matrix Factorization
Ravi Kumar, Rina Panigrahy, Ali Rahimi, David Woodruff

On Variational Bounds of Mutual Information
Ben Poole, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Van Den Oord, Alex Alemi, George Tucker

Guided Evolutionary Strategies: Augmenting Random Search with Surrogate Gradients
Niru Maheswaranathan, Luke Metz, George Tucker, Dami Choi, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Semi-Cyclic Stochastic Gradient Descent
Hubert Eichner, Tomer Koren, Brendan McMahan, Nathan Srebro, Kunal Talwar

Workshops
1st Workshop on Understanding and Improving Generalization in Deep Learning
Organizers Include: Dilip Krishnan, Hossein Mobahi
Invited Speaker: Chelsea Finn

Climate Change: How Can AI Help?
Invited Speaker: John Platt

Generative Modeling and Model-Based Reasoning for Robotics and AI
Organizers Include: Dumitru Erhan, Sergey Levine, Kimberly Stachenfeld
Invited Speaker: Chelsea Finn

Human In the Loop Learning (HILL)
Organizers Include: Been Kim

ICML 2019 Time Series Workshop
Organizers Include: Vitaly Kuznetsov

Joint Workshop on On-Device Machine Learning & Compact Deep Neural Network Representations (ODML-CDNNR)
Organizers Include: Sujith Ravi, Zornitsa Kozareva

Negative Dependence: Theory and Applications in Machine Learning
Organizers Include: Jennifer Gillenwater, Alex Kulesza

Reinforcement Learning for Real Life
Organizers Include: Lihong Li
Invited Speaker: Craig Boutilier

Uncertainty and Robustness in Deep Learning
Organizers Include: Justin Gilmer

Theoretical Physics for Deep Learning
Organizers Include: Jaehoon Lee, Jeffrey Pennington, Yasaman Bahri

Workshop on the Security and Privacy of Machine Learning
Organizers Include: Nicolas Papernot
Invited Speaker: Been Kim

Exploration in Reinforcement Learning Workshop
Organizers Include: Benjamin Eysenbach, Surya Bhupatiraju, Shixiang Gu

ICML Workshop on Imitation, Intent, and Interaction (I3)
Organizers Include: Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn
Invited Speaker: Pierre Sermanet

Identifying and Understanding Deep Learning Phenomena
Organizers Include: Hanie Sedghi, Samy Bengio, Kenji Hata, Maithra Raghu, Ali Rahimi, Ying Xiao

Workshop on Multi-Task and Lifelong Reinforcement Learning
Organizers Include: Sarath Chandar, Chelsea Finn
Invited Speakers: Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine

Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning
Organizers Include: Pierre Sermanet

Invertible Neural Networks and Normalizing Flows
Organizers Include: Rianne Van den Berg, Danilo J. Rezende
Invited Speakers: Eric Jang, Laurent Dinh

Google Assistant comes to Waze navigation app

Ever since Google acquired Waze back in 2013, features from each have been slowly making their way back and forth between it and Google Maps – and today Waze gets a big upgrade with Google Assistant integration, which means you can use the smart voice companion within the app.

Google Assistant in Waze will provide access to your usual Assistant features, like playback of music and podcasts, but it’ll also offer access to many Waze-specific abilities, including letting you asking it to report traffic conditions, or specifying that you want to avoid tolls when routing to your destination.

Google has done a good job of rolling out support for Assistant in its own Android Auto in-car software, and even brought it to Google Maps on Apple’s competing CarPlay system earlier this year. The benefits of having Assistant work natively within Waze are many, but the number one might be its potential to reduce distractions while on the road.

Waze remains a top choice among drivers, and anecdotally most Uber and Lyft drivers I encounter still swear by its supremacy over the competition, including Google’s other own-branded Maps solution.

Google Assistant will be available via a roll-out starting today in the U.S., in English only to start and on Android smartphones. Expect that availability to expand over time.

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Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal

On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and (more generally) tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal.

The latter is publicly traded and this deal will involve shares of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock getting exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock, the company said, and so the $15.7 billion figure is the enterprise value of the transaction, based on the average price of Salesforce’s shares as of June 7, 2019.

This is a huge jump on Tableau’s last market cap: it was valued at $10.79 billion at close of trading Friday, according to figures on Google Finance. (Also: trading has halted on its stock in light of this news.)

The two boards have already approved the deal, Salesforce notes. The two companies’ management teams will be hosting a conference call at 8am Eastern and I’ll listen in to that as well to get more details.

This is a huge deal for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and into deeper layers of analytics.

The company reportedly worked hard to — but ultimately missed out on — buying LinkedIn (which Microsoft picked up instead), and while there isn’t a whole lot in common between LinkedIn and Tableau, this deal is also about extending engagement with the customers that Salesforce already has.

This also looks like a move designed to help bulk up against Google’s move to buy Looker, announced last week, although I’d argue that analytics is a big enough area that all major tech companies that are courting enterprises are getting their ducks in a row in terms of squaring up to stronger strategies (and products) in this area. It’s unclear whether (and if) the two deals were made in response to each other.

“We are bringing together the world’s #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform. Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers. It’s truly the best of both worlds for our customers–bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world,” said Marc Benioff, Chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce, in a statement. “I’m thrilled to welcome Adam and his team to Salesforce.”

Tableau has about 86,000 business customers including Charles Schwab, Verizon (which owns TC), Schneider Electric, Southwest and Netflix. Salesforce said it will operate independently and under its own brand post-acquisition. It will also remain headquartered in Seattle, WA, headed by CEO Adam Selipsky along with others on the current leadership team.

That’s not to say, though, that the two will not be working together: on the contrary, Salesforce is already talking up the possibilities of expanding what the company is already doing with its Einstein platform (launched back in 2016, Einstein is the home of all of Salesforce’s AI-based initiatives); and with “Customer 360”, which is the company’s product and take on omnichannel sales and marketing. The latter is an obvious and complementary product home, given that one huge aspect of Tableau’s service is to provide “big picture” insights.

“Joining forces with Salesforce will enhance our ability to help people everywhere see and understand data,” said Selipsky. “As part of the world’s #1 CRM company, Tableau’s intuitive and powerful analytics will enable millions more people to discover actionable insights across their entire organizations. I’m delighted that our companies share very similar cultures and a relentless focus on customer success. I look forward to working together in support of our customers and communities.”

“Salesforce’s incredible success has always been based on anticipating the needs of our customers and providing them the solutions they need to grow their businesses,” said Keith Block, co-CEO, Salesforce. “Data is the foundation of every digital transformation, and the addition of Tableau will accelerate our ability to deliver customer success by enabling a truly unified and powerful view across all of a customer’s data.”

More to come as we learn it. Refresh for updates.

 

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7 Thrifty Android Apps to Save Money on Car Expenses