Salesforce.com Inc. will be entering the data analytics and business intelligence business, with the announcement of Wave, its new cloud-based information analytics system.
Business intelligence refers to a series of tools and techniques that turn raw data into meaningful information that businesses can use to better plan their strategies.
The company is aiming to attract more customers to use their data centers to store information, branching out from customer-relationship management software.
Wave will allow companies to link data from different business divisions into the Salesforce system to later analyze and view on the internet. The new service is search based with data stored in a schema-less way, which makes it quick for users to search for answers to questions.
The move represents Salesforce’s goal of entering the data-analytics markets, which is forecast to grow at an annual rate of 9.4 percent through 2018.
This will allow companies to identify links between different business departments, such as the link between the how many times salespeople have had successful calls with a customer and the failure rates on the equipment sold to the client.
Alex Davon, Salesforce’s head of products, said in an interview:
“We’re very focused on the CRM market today, so launching an analytics cloud is a departure from our core market,”
There is more potential for sales in data analytics compared to customer-relationship management. In 2013 the analytics software industry generated $37.7 billion in revenue compared to $20.5 billion generated in the CRM market.
Wave is based on technology that Salesforce acquired when it bought out the data-analytics startup EdgeSpring Inc., in June 2013.
The company’s main competitors will be providers of data-analysis and business intelligence services, such as Microsoft Corp., SAP, Oracle Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Tableau Software Inc.
On October 20 the product will be available and sold on a monthly subscription basis.