Salesforce.com Launches Wave Analytics Cloud

Salesforce.com has kicked off the first day of its Dreamforce customer event in San Francisco with the launch of Wave, a cloud-based data analytics service.

The service, which complements Salesforce’s offerings in sales, service, marketing, community, and mobile applications, is designed with non-technical users in mind and is aimed first and foremost at mobile devices, with iOS and Android versions to be available from 20 October. The company said Wave’s simplified interface was inspired by mobile gaming applications.

Unstructured data

Wave allows users to filter and group data and then visualise and drill down into the results, covering the needs of most users, Salesforce said. It is based on a NoSQL back-end that offers a maximum of flexibility, meaning data doesn’t need to be formatted in the predefined schemas required from conventional databases.

The software, integrated with the company’s Salesforce1 platform, can work with customers’ own data or that from third parties, including structured SAP and Oracle data or unstructured data from machine or social sources. More than 30 Wave partners are holding demonstrations at Dreamforce, including Accenture, Deloitte Digital and Informatica.

More advanced capabilities, such as predictive analytics, will be provided by partners including C9, Fliptop, Predixion, and Wise.io, Salesforce said. The data can be shared via Salesforce Chatter to trigger new workflows and tasks.

Intuitive approach

“The Wave analytics cloud eliminates the painfully slow, complex and unintuitive legacy approaches that have long separated business users from their data – finally, there are analytics for the rest of us,” said Alex Dayon, Salesforce.com president for products, in a statement.

“Explorer” business user subscriptions will be available on Wave for $125 (£78) per user, per month, with “Builder” subscriptions for administrators offered for $250 per user per month.

The company in June launched Salesforce Wear, a software development suite aimed at wearable technology.

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