Thread by @hyounpark

In the #analytics world, @narrativesci just got purchased by @salesforce/@tableau. This is a huge deal for opening up Natural Language Generation to the data community and a fantastic outcome for a company I've followed closely over the past decade: narrativescience.com/resource/blog/…

Narrative Science has over 70 current or pending patents associated with natural language in creating its user interface focused on letting people see analytic results as plain language stories in its Lexio product: narrativescience.com/lexio/

One of the most interesting things about Narrative Science is that it's an academic project pioneer that ended up being a market leader as well, similar to Tableau and Databricks, but in a slightly nichier market. This is hard: many primary technologies fail as companies

But one of Narrative Science's biggest challenges has always been that the people who appreciate Lexio most are line-of-business users, but the leading LOB technologies are enterprise SaaS applications & not analytics solutions. So, there's a mismatch between buyer and seller

The Salesforce acquisition solves this problem and hopefully puts Narrative Science front-and-center for the executive suite where it can be positioned more like Domo as a solution for business managers & leaders to understand the story of their data.

This acquisition will help push the concept of "data storytelling" forward. For 200 years, data storytelling has meant building a visualization & explaining the picture that is worth a thousand words. Now, we can move closer to the actual story, wordsmithing, and explicit context

And Narrative Science is part of an important sea-change happening in #analytics right now where natural language, decision management, business context, ML modeling, & analytic data variety are all taking giant steps all at once.

It's not a perfect comparison, but this feels to me a bit like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. Salesforce bought a relatively small company that was changing the game from an interface perspective & now has the infrastructure to push it from a niche to a global standard.

Since this purchase is in the "intent to acquire" stage, Tableau and Narrative Science can't share details on product plans yet. But it will be interesting for Narrative Science to work more closely with Tableau & MuleSoft as a reference model.

@threadreaderapp please unroll!