Picture credit: Salesforce
Cloudy giant Salesforce has announced Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, as its Dreamforce event in San Francisco. The platform is designed to make it easier than ever before to explore data, and take action from any device.
You can’t say it wasn’t coming. Last month Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted out a “top secret” version of the Dreamforce schedule, and it soon came to people’s attention that the first keynote on October was entitled “analytics cloud.”
An updated one later that month – again “top secret”, with “do not share or tweet” written underneath it – was tweeted out by Benioff, this time with “Project Wave keynote” replacing analytics cloud. It certainly must be an exciting development at Salesforce HQ, as the chief exec was tweeting out updates over the weekend, breaking his own company’s embargo.
“Today, Salesforce is disrupting the analytics market, just as we disrupted the CRM industry 15 years ago,” Benioff said. “We’re not only connecting companies with customers in a whole new way with our Customer Success Platform, we’re empowering companies to know their customers like never before with the groundbreaking Wave Analytics Cloud.”
Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, a Salesforce Analytics Cloud partner, said: “Salesforce’s entrance into the business intelligence market with its Analytics Cloud offering is well-timed. Most of the BI tools on the market today are built on last-generation technology that is not focused on the new user-led analysis needs, and they have not been born to take full advantage of the cloud or mobile platforms.
“The benefit of Wave for customers is that it democratises business intelligence; it embraces the new user-led data discovery and puts the power in the hands of everyday users,” he added.
This represents a very interesting area for Salesforce, for whom various observers – Ben Kepes of Forbes being one of them – saw analytics as one of the missing pieces of the jigsaw.
Last month Bluewolf released its yearly report showing the state of Salesforce adoption. The report found that the Salesforce Sales Cloud was used by 89% of respondents, Service Cloud by 46%, Community Cloud by 22%, and Marketing Cloud by 18%.
The latter two were said to be growing at a rate which is ‘on fire’. It’ll be interesting to see how Wave performs here.
