Enterprise tech IPOs have seen big movement over the past few years. Now we can add big data and data visualization company Tableau Software to the list of successful enterprise IPOs, as its share price has popped as much as 60 percent in early trading today.

Last night, Tableau priced its IPO at $31 per share, raising $254 million with an offering of 8.2 million shares. Now that price has shot up to about $49 on the New York Stock Exchange, as of this writing.

Tableau offers products to help technical and nontechnical users create interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Tableau generated $127.7 million in annual sales in 2012, more than double its 2011 revenue and more than quadruple its 2010 revenue. Back in November, we picked Tableau as one of 10 startups leading the way in big data.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Tableau CEO and cofounder Christian Chabot told us in a recent interview.

Tableau originally filed for its IPO in early April. At that time, it was just looking to raise $150 million in its initial public offering.

Prior to the IPO, Seattle-based Tableau raised $15 million in funding over two rounds from New Enterprise Associates. NEA’s partners and investors have got to be pretty happy with this deal, as the fund was seeing a 20x return on its investment in Tableau, according to Fortune’s Dan Primack — and that was before today’s pop.

Screenshot via Tableau/YouTube

Spreadsheets are the awkward, unpopular Mary Katherine Gallaghers of software. A new app, Permanent, turns them into superstars.

Permanent is a tablet app for spreadsheets. In a world where more of us are carrying our work in trendy cross-body bags and completing small tasks while on the train or waiting in line, touch-friendly spreadsheet software for tablets seems like a no-brainer.

Yet Google Drive and similar mobile apps give us plenty of spreadsheet-related headaches to this day. And we get that; spreadsheets aren’t sexy. No one ever got a big tech blog writeup for their awesome work on spreadsheets, right?

This is why Permanent is so remarkable. It takes something unsexy and makes it glamorous to look at and pleasurable to use.

As Tweetie and Letterpress creator Loren Brichter tweeted of the new app, “When thought through, touch can be so much more powerful than keyboard/mouse. This embodies that spirit.”

These new spreadsheets are touch-optimized. They support scripting and have tons of undo/redo options. The app can handle big, database-size sheets, and you can write and use formulas to your heart’s content. Upcoming releases will also import and export spreadsheets to and from the more common file formats, including Excel, CSV, and ODF.

Permanent is starting on iPad. Right now, it’s selling for $10, a 50 percent discount for its planned $20 price.

Here are some screenshots for ya:

Permanent is the code-child of developer/designer Kyle Hickinson of Ontario, Canada. He’s been designing iOS apps since 2009. His partner for Permanent is Kevin Lawler, a computer science-focused entrepreneur based in San Francisco.

Top image courtesy of Yuganov Konstantin, Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — In business, spreadsheet ninjas can reach black belt-worthy levels of skill, and still remain ignorant of the most basic database concepts.

Michael J. Chen got tired of fighting his employees’ love of Excel and decided, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. His new company, BiBo Labs, makes an Excel-based tool for generating reports from a variety of database sources.

BiBo launched at DEMO Fall 2011 today.

“Businesses today are similar to the masses of the Dark Ages,” Chen told VentureBeat in an email, with ordinary users dependent on a priest-like caste of IT managers to transfer data from databases into a more accessible form. “Segovia is a paradigm shift because it is introducing a type of technology that is the equivalent of the movable type. … Power users can now dynamically drive Microsoft Excel for an entire company with [only] a tenuous understanding of [database] schema.”

“Segovia is the equivalent of a modern-day Gutenberg print press in an enterprise.”

Those are big words, but for anyone who has tried to wrestle multiple relational databases into the more accessible format of an Excel file, it’s an appealing story.

For instance, suppose you’ve got a data repository in an Oracle database, along with a CRM system tracking sales data in Salesforce.com, and some additional applications in Netsuite. Using BiBo Labs’ Segovia tool, you can create complex reports that draw data from all of these sources using a simple markup language. Then, your spreadsheet ninjas can access these reports simply by clicking a button on the Segovia web portal and downloading an Excel spreadsheet, pre-populated with data from the database and the formulas and totals you’ve set up.

Chen says that Segovia can pull data from big data repositories such as Hadoop, Mongo, and NoSQL; cloud based web services such as Salesforce.com, Concur, Netsuite, and the like; and traditional relational databases.

“It looked pretty slick, and pulled from all those big data sources. Pretty impressive,” said Claire Lee, head of partnerships for the emerging business team at Microsoft.

Chen created BiBo labs in 2011, incubating it within another company he owns, Evolution Design Lab, which is a distributor of mass-market women’s footwear.

“EDL had spent millions of dollars on our proprietary supply chain system, yet the users were not accepting/adopting a significant portion of the reporting,” Chen said, echoing the lament of ambitious IT project managers everywhere. “As I dove deeper into the implementation, I realized how unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive it would be to migrate off spreadsheets.” Thus, Segovia was born.

BiBo Labs has taken no outside funding and Chen is not seeking any, telling VentureBeat he has the ability to continue to support the company within EDL for several years.

BiBo Labs is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear

The Bellevue, Wash. company offers a long list of spreadsheets (it calls them “smartsheets”, naturally) to its customers, with additions last year such as sales and outsourcing. According to a company blog post from July, the most-used sheet is for project management, but “a good percentage of our customers begin using Smartsheet for one category and quickly expand to the others.”

Smartsheet says it is already cashflow positive and that the new funding should help it build on its momentum. One of the company’s main distribution strategies is through business application marketplaces like the Google Apps Marketplace, where Smartsheet currently has the top-rated (but not most-downloaded) app. Smartsheet apps are also offered in VMware, Amazon, and Intuit marketplaces, with Jive and Salesforce coming soon.

The company has now raised more than $7 million in funding. Previous investor Madrona Ventures Group led the new round.

[top image via Flickr/Ed Bierman]