Salesforce Pays Up for Tableau, Continuing Benioff's Tradition

Salesforce.com Inc.’s $15.3 billion purchase of Tableau Inc. shows once again that co-founder Marc Benioff doesn’t shy away from paying handsomely for companies he covets.

The price tag is about 13 times Tableau’s revenue, ranking it among the most expensive software deals recently, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The only other deals that were more costly on that basis were Cisco Systems Inc.’s acquisition of AppDynamics in 2017, SAP SE’s purchase of Qualtrics last fall, and Salesforce’s own takeover of MuleSoft a year ago -- a process also driven by Benioff.