Salesforce Unveils First App Off Wave Analytics Cloud Platform

Eight months after launching the new Wave Analytics platform, and only a couple of weeks after announcing a massive expansion through various new partnerships,  Salesforce has presented its first mobile application to take advantage of the Wave platform. The appropriately titled Sales Wave Analytics can tap data from Salesforce applications. In addition it is available for the Cloudera or Hortonworks Hadoop-based systems managing unstructured data, various Windows applications, and other third-party data that has been brought into the Wave Analytics Cloud. Wave Analytics Apps will include accelerator templates, historical analysis, and Wave Actions. This means business users will now be able to act instantly within the app, whether it is creating a task, initiating a conversation or even changing a performance measure. Much of the data that the application works with is already used by Salesforce and business analysts. However, they are laboriously gathering it in spreadsheets, stacks of email messages and reports. Sales Wave Analytics gathers the data automatically. It can then summarize it visually. “What we were trying to do then and will continue to be doing is delivering analytics to everyone,” said Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. “We looked at what Google is doing with search-based query, and we put that in the Wave platform,” she added. “All of these new ways of taking action and doing business … we put those technologies into the Wave platform and turned the analytics experience on its head.” But amidst all this talk of data accessibility, how will the average sales rep handle the massive stream of information that’s now meant to be at the palm of his hand, and if Salesforce’s plans unfurl nicely, will soon become a must-have? Rosenman has a surprising answer: “Rather than looking to the enterprise space, we looked to the consumer space,” she told CRN In a recent interview. “Consumers don’t use spreadsheets, they like to get instant, actionable information by accessing their cloud-based applications. In that sense, the new analytics apps are “designed for everyone,” offering mobility, speed and flexibility for employees in all roles within an organization. Currently in pilot with select customers, the app is expected to be generally available later this year.