Digest...

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff is bullish about his company’s newest software, the Wave cloud service for visualizing data. But it’s good to keep in mind just how big of an opportunity lies ahead, at least from Benioff’s perspective.

Indeed, the company today told analysts that it was expecting $6.5 billion in revenue for its 2016 fiscal year. And considering that Benioff is, as he put it, “extremely optimistic” about Wave’s capabilities from a money-making perspective, it’s fair to believe that soon enough Wave will become a major contributor to the company’s top-line revenues, right up there with Salesforce’s popular sales cloud for tracking leads.

But while Wave is already available in app stores, providing “analytics for the rest of us,” Benioff said it’s not just an application. He sees it as a platform on top of which other applications can be built.

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Digest...

Wave falls short in these areas:

1. High user involvement

While it provides a lightweight self-service BI solution, it requires users to proactively ask questions of the data and hunt for answers. Essentially, Wave provides the canvas and palette, but you’re ultimately responsible for the painting.

2. Actionable data

For big data to be, well, big data, it must give the user an actionable insight, and actionability isn’t a core component of Wave. Providing all data all the time — like Wave does — is not the answer.

3. The cost of doing business

Using Wave pushes users into the Salesforce analytics cloud. The cost of moving all your data to the cloud to create a consolidated cloud data warehouse could be prohibitive for many businesses. However, Wave is still labor and IT intensive. The fact that it’s partnering with Informatica and Dell Boomi suggests that there’s no silver bullet when it comes to data integration and management. There’s still a heavy ETL and modeling exercise required on a customer-by-customer basis to translate the data into a consumable format, which is timely and costly.

4. Everyone needs to be an analyst

Wave is great, but it’s not a solution in itself. It still requires everyone to be an analyst to comb through the data to ask questions and find answers. Think about it this way: You can have the coolest car in the world, but it’s useless without a driver. Data discovery and analysis is necessary to get any value out of Wave.

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Digest...

Before placing SFDC on your digital analytics vendor shortlist you should consider that the capability:

1-Is targeted at SFDCs existing marketing cloud customers.  It is built more as "light weight" analytics capability providing BI pros the ability to natively ingest web and mobile data into their SFDC instances.

2-Will not replace existing enterprise systems. Salesforce claim it will “complement” existing enterprise digital analytics systems that do very much the same thing (i.e. collect, analyze and act on customer behavioral data) and more.

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Digest...

The new service from Salesforce, whose mobile app is already available for iOS, amounts to a major step forward for the enterprise software, not only because it expands the company’s reach beyond the sales, marketing, and service software categories, but also because the release changes the dynamics of Salesforce’s relationships with partners that have offered business-intelligence (BI) or data analytics capabilities in the past. Some are formally announcing partnerships; others aren’t. In any case, it’s a big day in data world.

Salesforce is announcing that it’s teaming up with several early-stage companies in the predictive-analytics market: 6Sense, C9, Fliptop, Gainsight, Lattice Engines, Predixion, and Wise.io.

The choice of partnering rather than baking in predictive capability shows Salesforce doesn’t want to completely turn off its ecosystem of companies that offer to crunch data from Salesforce and assist sales people in figuring out which leads to focus on.

The standalone Wave service costs $250 per month for each person who imports data sets — “builders,” in Salesforce parlance — and $125 per month for each person working with available data, or “explorers.” The Wave mobile app comes free of charge.

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