Salesforce Aims To "Revolutionise Analytics" With Wave Analytics Cloud

Salesforce has announced a new service called Wave Analytics Cloud, which is designed to make deriving insights from analytics as easy as possible, wherever you are with whatever device.

Salesforce boasts that Wave does for the analytics process what the company did in transforming CRM well over a decade ago, and revolutionises the whole process from start to finish.

It offers a dynamic interface, indexed search and powerful analytics engine in a single cloud platform which is designed for business users (not just analysts). The system provides access to vast reservoirs of data in easy to understand form, and also boasts social features to enable collaboration and the swift sharing of insights.

The UI is optimised for mobile and displays data via interactive dashboards, charts and suchlike, with easily customisable views – plus every data source is indexed for quick query processing. Business analysts will also be able to combine third-party data sources in one single dashboard, for further insights and potential data correlations.

Wave is fully integrated with the Salesforce1 Platform and uses the same single sign-on (plus it boasts the same security and data compliance features). In other words, you'll be able to simply drag and drop data in from Salesforce, or partner apps.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce, commented: "Today, Salesforce is disrupting the analytics market, just as we disrupted the CRM industry 15 years ago. 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."

Dan Vesset?, ?program vice president of business analytics research, IDC, observed: "The demand for self-service analytics is sweeping across every business function, as end-users demand relevant business insights delivered at the right time to increase their competitiveness and make decisions that positively impact revenue?s?."

"This swings open the door for a cloud-based analytics solution, such as Wave, which enables companies to circumvent bottlenecks inherent in the traditional analytics model to give users a more mobile, collaborative and simple approach to exploring any volume and variety of data sources."

Over 30 ecosystem partners will showcase the system at Dreamforce 2014 this week, with Wave Analytics Cloud to become available from 20 October. The mobile app will be out for iOS first, with other platforms to follow.

A Wave Explorer license will cost $125 (£78) per user per month, and offer the ability to view, personalise and share insights and dashboards. The Wave Builder license, at $250 (£155) per user per month, allows for the creation and management of data sets, data connections and user access.