Announced at this year's Dreamforce, Wave is Salesforce’s first business intelligence and data analytics package.

The product, also referred to as the Saleseforece Analytics Cloud, collects and analyzes all the data sitting in the user’s database to provide insights that could lead to better business decisions. Users can click on graphs to get immediate insights over their business. from lots of different angles, like which sales channel performs the best, across different regions or products. It can track each of the sales rep’s performance and customer satisfaction data in real time, giving a complete picture of the team’s performance.

Before revealing Wave in his keynote, Marc Benioff challenged his audience to contemplate the scenario that has motivated this product:

“Did you know 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years? There’s going to be 10 times more mobile data by 2020, 19 times more unstructured data, and 50 times more product data by 2020.”

These statistics have been propelling companies and organisations to take big data seriously for quite some time and Salesforce is arguably a bit slow off the mark. However, its entry in the market at this point may give it advantages. It is claimed to be "a lot faster and easier to use ... allowing users to explore data more easily". This video shows it in action in conjunction with data collected by Salesforce partner FinancialForce.

SalesForce has lots of partners who already provide clients analytics insights so how will Wave sit alongside their offerings?

In the first instance Wave is available as an iOS app and thus is seen as  mainly aimed at delivering reports to mobile devices, to sales and marketing people in the field rather than delivering deeper business intelligence or full enterprise resource planning. 

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