Salesforce launched their journey into the world of Big Data by launching their Wave Analytics Cloud platform last October. The product is intended to provide cloud-based analytics for your sales, service and marketing needs, which you can gain access to from both mobile and desktop devices wherever you are.
It was only a matter of time before Salesforce joined the big data game, since they wouldnt want to lose out on the next biggest thing. The move was easy enough, given the large market share they already enjoy, and a robust developer and user community to keep them striving for more and better.
The Wave Analytics platform is no unexpected; prior to its release, there was extensive tooting by the companies top man Marc Benioff, who broke the companys silence a week before the October Dreamforce product launch in San Francisco.
How Wave Works
Wave Analytics provides a platform to generate packaged or customized analytics for the three main Salesforce service areas i.e. sales, service and marketing. The platform is intended to provide additional support for Salesforce products, but it is possible to import data from third-party vendor databases such as Informatica, Microsoft, SAP and Google, New Relic, Hortonworks and Trifacta following connectors that were launched in May this year.
According to Salesforce products president Alex Dayon, the platform was developed in response to a huge collective need for the customer base, who previously had to rely on third party data analytical tools intended for data analysts and data scientists.
Visualization of Data
With the explosion of data that any company needs to store, Wave Analytics presents a useful way to visualize data through pretty and understandable pictorial representations graphs, charts, patterns etc. proper visualization of data is as important as having the data itself, making this s useful tool for Salesforce customers in this big data environment.
You can use the application to examine a wide range of consumer-based qualities, sorting it out by figures, regions, demographical qualities and others. In addition, patterns and gaps can be outlined and derived, and related information from various sources brought in to give detailed reports, including recommendations for future action in light of the present data.
You can also switch between various data representations e.g. from line/bar graphs to pie charts and so forth. With this, you can quickly pick out possible trends to inform your strategy.
While this is not the first of its kind in the market, Salesforce Wave analytics is practical, easy to use and is supported on a variety of devices (all devices on which Salesforce is supported). The millions of customers currently using Salesforce also make it prime ground for third-party software developers to build applications based on the platform, to extend functionality for the wider consumer market.
Being a $38 billion industry and growing, the analytics industry was the next Goliath for the CRM giants to conquer, and it appears they have done just that. Thousands of developers worldwide are building on Force.coms cloud platform owing to the many advantages it presents over other choices, not the least of which is the significantly large customer base using the product.
