Salesforce Enters Cloud Analytics Market, Announces Wave

At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce’s 12th annual CRM conference with more than 135,000 people attending, the company has announced Wave – a new cloud analytics platform. The business intelligence solution would enable companies to quickly deploy sales, service and marketing analytics, to explore data, uncover new insights and take action instantly from any device.

Rather than delivering a visualization tool or yet another layer of abstraction that separates business users from the insights they need, Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud would bring together a dynamic user experience, indexed search and a powerful computing engine into a single, vertically-integrated cloud analytics platform.

“Today, Salesforce is disrupting the analytics market, just as we disrupted the CRM industry 15 years ago,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. “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.” 

For Business Users 

Wave Analytics Cloud is designed for business users, not just analysts. With its schema-free architecture, data no longer has to be pre-sorted or organized in some narrowly defined manner before it can be analyzed. Business users would be able to instantly access and easily analyze billions of rows of data themselves, just as they do in popular consumer travel apps that empower them to explore and filter the entire world of commercial flights in seconds.

salesforce-waveIn addition, business analysts can take a more strategic approach to delivering insights by creating mash-ups of relevant third-party data sources in a single dashboard, enabling users to identify data correlations that ignite business actions. Wave also enables social collaboration. As business users derive insights, dashboards can be shared via Salesforce Chatter and new workflows and tasks can be triggered.

Wave’s new user-experience is inspired by the most sophisticated advancements in consumer apps and video games, which are optimized for both mobile phones and tablets. Wave delivers data through interactive dashboards, lenses and charts designed to help business users intuitively filter data, customize views and learn as they go.

Salesforce Wave APIs

Wave is natively integrated with the Salesforce1 Platform and shares the same single sign-on, data security and compliance features of the platform. This enables users to quickly drag and drop data from Salesforce, including data from partner apps built on the platform, to deploy sales, service and marketing analytics apps.

In addition, developers and IT can use Wave APIs and other data connectors to easily connect to third-party data sources – from structured SAP and Oracle data to unstructured machine and social data. And because Wave is a platform, developers can also build custom analytics apps for any business function, or embed analytics into a new generation of apps and connected products for customers.

Wave Analytics Cloud is expected to be generally available October 20, 2014 in English, with additional language support forthcoming. The Wave mobile app will initially be available on Apple iOS for iPhone and iPad, with additional device support forthcoming. The Salesforce Wave Platform license includes all compute, data management, API and security infrastructure. Monthly subscription pricing for the Wave Platform is based on the number of Wave Explorer and Wave Builder licenses.