The CRM giant appears to be “doing what it can to avoid stepping on partners’ toes,” Pund-IT analyst Charles King told VentureBeat. Launching tomorrow, the newest cloud is “mainly aimed at delivering reports to mobile devices, to sales and marketing people in the field,” he said, and less oriented toward extensive queries.

He also noted Salesforce has said that advanced capabilities, notably including the predictive analytics that project which customers are most likely to close a deal, will still be led by Salesforce partners.

Additionally, specific partners — Dell Boomi, MuleSoft, and Informatica among them — will be involved in data integration.

Salesforce may be setting up Wave to become the leading edge in its effort to become more of a player in the enterprise, beyond its current CRM/Marketing/Sales focus. Once a company is accustomed to using Wave for some data analysis, it’s a short step to using it as a tool for other kinds of analysis — relating to, say, inventory, manufacturing, delivery logistics, whatever.

___________________________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

Digest...

Scott McCorkle, the CEO of Salesforce’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud: The analytics market is ripe for disruption … Marketers are more focused on data than ever before. The Marketing Cloud team is very excited about Wave, the Analytics Cloud. Data from the Marketing Cloud can be made available in Analytics Cloud at launch. We will continue to integrate into Analytics Cloud so this data movement can be automatic for customers. The new data visualizations in both Journey Builder and Analytics Cloud are the most innovative I have seen. But this goes beyond just visualization. This is about helping people create mobile analytics apps for any business need.

VentureBeat: How does the Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud visualization capabilities compare with its competitors?

McCorkle: I think across enterprise software generally there’s a trend of business software looking more like consumer software, and being easier to use, and having a nicer interface. What we’re doing goes a step further, and actually creates a level of visualization that I have not seen in any other software. We actually call these Journey Maps, because it’s how an organization wants to map the journey of their customer. It can look like a map, it can look like a flow, it can have any kind of graphical annotation, and show all the analytics overlayed on the map, in real-time. So I think what we’re building is very, very unique.

___________________________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

These are the dynamics of the market that salesforce.com entered on October 13, 2014 with Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud — a BI platform based on technology it acquired from EdgeSpring over a year ago. Out of the box, the newly announced Wave product boasts Agile Analytics directed at business users (with minimal support from technology pros), native, modern cloud architecture, clean intuiteve built for mobile user interface, seamless integration with salesforce.com CRM data, agile NoSQL DBMS, MPP architecture for big data scalability, and other 21st century features.

But while we feel that Wave is a cool product for specific use cases (mostly salesforce.com data source, no other BI vendor already doing the job, etc), there's lots of room for improvement before Wave can take its place among general purpose large enterprise BI platforms.

___________________________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).