Salesforce is throwing nearly $16 billion on the table to acquire data analytics platform provider Tableau. The deal is the biggest acquisition by Salesforce and will allow it to add more granularity to its customer relationship management (CRM) offering.

The deal is structured as an all-stock transaction, with each Tableau Class A and Class B common stock being exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock. Its total valuation is near $15.7 billion and is set to close by Oct. 31, which is the end of Salesforce’s fiscal third quarter.

Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, cited the ability to integrate Tableau’s platform into Salesforce’s Customer 360 and Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) product to further drive penetration into a customer’s operations.

Tableau’s analytics service is available on premises, it can be hosted in a public cloud, or it can be consumed via an internet connection as a managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. Tableau President and CEO Adam Selipsky said the company will continue supporting those service models.

Selipsky and the current Tableau management team will continue to helm those operations, which will remain an independent operation and keep its name. It will also remain headquartered in Seattle, which should be good news for Tableau’s approximately 4,200 employees.

Benioff said that Salesforce has been looking at a deal with Tableau “for a long time, but it was hard to get the stars to align.” He noted that desire was driven by a growing number of its customers that were already using Tableau for their data analytics needs.

BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman noted in a research report that he felt the pricing of the deal was "not expensive relative to other software deals," however he questioned the need to purchase Tableau.

"On the surface, management’s criteria seems to be that a bigger Salesforce is better," Bachman wrote. "We believe that the vast majority of data leveraged by Tableau has been and will continue to be generated by non-Salesforce sources. Further, we think the buyer for self-service BI tools is very different from Salesforce's other solutions."

The deal also comes just days after Google announced plans to acquire privately-held data analytics provider Looker for $2.6 billion in cash.

Steve Hilton, president of MachNation, noted that the Looker platform will help customers glean more value from their Google Cloud deployments. He added that it will also help Google Cloud compete more directly against Microsoft’s Power BI analytics tools. “Looker provides a way for enterprises to conduct sophisticated analytics, machine learning, and visualizations on data.”

That same enhancement should be in play for Salesforce as it also battles against Microsoft’s Power BI tools. Salesforce customers can currently connect their Salesforce data into Power BI.

Salesforce’s previous largest acquisition was its $6.5 billion purchase of application network platform provider Mulesoft that closed early last year.

Salesforce said the deal will increase its full-year revenues by up to $400 million, but also cause a 75 basis point year-over-year hit to its operating margin and an impact of between 37 cents and 39 cent per share for the current fiscal year.

Salesforce last week posted robust results for its first fiscal quarter of 2020, and raised its fiscal expectations for the full financial year. Those Q1 results included a 24% year-over-year surge in revenues to $3.74 billion, and a slight uptick in net income to $392 million that helped boost earnings per share to around 50% higher than forecasts. The company said it expects $16.25 billion in full-year revenue.

Tableau itself was coming off of a mixed first fiscal quarter that ended March 31. The company’s revenues surged nearly 15% year over year, however increased expenses nearly doubled its net losses to $88.9 million for the quarter.