I finally got in touch with a Tableau salesperson and discovered that Tableau Server is not cheap–well, okay, I didn’t really expect that it would be. It’s priced by the user as well, so if you have lots of users, you’ll need to negotiate the pricing with them. And interactors, as they call users who interact with the data, cost considerably more per seat than users who simply view the data.
You’ve got to really need excellent, flexible data visualization–enough so that you’d pay $15,000 not to have to develop your own solution. (… plus per-user fees plus $1,800 for each copy of Tableau Desktop, which is what you use to create the visualizations you’re publishing … BTW, these are the list prices for their “Small server”.)
One thing I wish it did: I wish we could publish the visualizations inside our own web-based application, rather than publishing to theirs. We have a reports section in our web-based application that this type of data visualization would be awesome for–and it would save the developers so much time if we had something like this that could go from prototype to published in an hour.
But they’d need an API then, or something like Google Gadgets where you could publish your data visualization to a little gadget you employ on any web page. And their pricing model wouldn’t work (for us, anyway) in that situation.
Well, I’ve been having good luck at getting people to listen to me this week–are you listening, Tableau?
Other posts on Tableau and Data Visualization / Metrics / Reporting:
World of Usability 
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