New systemwide Tableau contract saves CU $900,000 over five years

A new Tableau contract negotiated with the support of all University of Colorado campuses will save the university at least $900,000 over five years.

Tableau’s interactive data visualization platform allows CU users to transform data into dashboards, reports and other business intelligence.

Before this contract, CU Boulder and CU Denver had Tableau instances under individual contracts, giving certain departments Tableau access.

All campuses came together, with University Information Services (UIS) and the Procurement Service Center (PSC) managing the negotiation, to combine into one universitywide Tableau contract to save money and expand access to more users across CU.

The campuses met to determine each campus’s needs and what would be required to expand this service systemwide. The negotiations and decisions took two years with Tableau to customize what CU needed and remove portions CU wouldn’t use.

CU now has one additional common platform that allows all campuses to share data and more easily collaborate. This contract also ensures CU compliance with HIPPA and FERPA, federal laws designed to protect the privacy and security of individuals.

Highlights of the new contract:

• Saves $900,000 over five years
• Increases processing capabilities to serve all campuses
• A five-year price lock is in place
• Removes unnecessary product suites in current contracts
• Reduces CU’s future Tableau desktop purchase prices by 10%

“This is an incredible win for all of CU and shows the power of cross-campus collaboration to leverage not only our size and scale but also our combined ingenuity to bring the university enabling technologies at greatly reduced prices,” said Scott Munson, associate vice president chief information officer for UIS.

The project to combine all CU data in Tableau still is in progress and is estimated to be completed by the end of summer 2021.