Salesforce Wave Crashes onto the BI and Analytics Industry

Launch

When Salesforce acquired EdgeSpring in June 2013, people started looking forward to what will be Salesforce’s next move.

And, then Marc Benioff tweeted twice about the upcoming launch and its inclusion in the Dreamforce keynote. That got the ball rolling. Rumors flew and the insiders got the wind of an analytics product that’s going to be launched. And, then, everyone was waiting for the “formal” launch. Staying true to its tradition of unveiling new products at Dreamforce every year, this year they launched Wave and Salesforce1 Lightning. If Dreamforce 13 was the year of marketing automation and capturing data across touch points, Dreamforce 14 was all about turning that data into action.

As Marc Benioff says “Just like we disrupted the CRM industry 15 years back; now, we will do the same with analytics industry”. The launch is well-timed, as this report by Gartner indicates that the Business Intelligence market was valued at about $14.4 billion in 2013, up nearly 8% from 2012. Comparatively, the year 2012 witnessed a 7% growth in the BI market on a year-on-year basis since 2011.

The market still has scope for a solution that can break away the siloed, highly specialized and closed world of BI tools that still challenges extraction of easy-to-understand and actionable data. Wave is positioned as the tool that will get the data where it really matters; in your employees’ hands, on-the-go. It leverages the power of mobile visualization and couples it with Salesforce native data and other established clouds; and transforms into a potentially powerful disrupter for the BI industry.

Impact

A recent report from McKinsey Global Institute highlights that decisions based on data-driven insights result in 23 times greater likelihood of customer acquisition, 6 times greater likelihood of customer retention and 19 times greater likelihood of profitability. Wave’s easy-to-use and intuitive feature makes it an amazing addition to the productivity tools arsenal for each department.

For Sales

For Marketing

For Service

For Community Managers

Features

• Self-service deployment: Built around using natural language, not coded or limited types of queries.
• Instant access to any data: Users can easily mash up different data sets and build customized dashboards that let the data tell a story.
• Search-based Queries: Users can build data marts, and install and optimize software and hardware before they need to start a search or ask a single question.
• Tight integration with salesforce.com operational data.
• NoSQL index and columnar DBMS technology; the massively parallel processing architecture—using Oracle 12c databases.
• Modern graphical user interface (GUI) built for mobile devices.

Pricing

But, it might just fall short of being awesome, if…

• Data accessibility
• Availability of data analysts who effortlessly bridge the gap and help derive deeper insights
• Real-time data updates
• Combination of predictive and prescriptive analytics; very few BI tools have the power to do that right now

Just like Salesforce disrupted the CRM industry 15 years back, we think, Wave will bring in the same innovation and game-changing tactics into the analytics industry as well. Till then, it’s wait and watch.

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