Delivering Actionable Insights Across the Customer Success Platform - Glass half full - and half empty!

This morning Salesforce announced the latest progress on their analytics platform - as part of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. It is an important area to watch as Salesforce for a long time has not been competitive on the reporting, data exploration side.


The press release can be found here - let's take a peek on my takeaways:

 
In case you don't have a chance to watch the video, let's go with these few bullets

 
  • Salesforce brings consistent visualization between OLAP and OLTP  - a good move
  • Salesforce brings integration of insight and action, all the way into the OLTP apps - a good move
  • ISVs are endorsing Salesforce Analytics Cloud - mentioned are Apptus, FinancialForce, Steelbrick and Vlocity - a good sign of value that Salesforce has created with Analytics Cloud
 
MyPOV
 
It's good to see Salesforce addressing the analytics and overall reporting / data visualization space on its platform. For a long time Salesforce has lacked adequate, modern reporting and visualization capabilities, even leaving this area explicitly to (partner) ISVs in the past. So more value for Salesforce customers.
 
On the concern side Salesforce Analytics Cloud is far from real time - with hourly updates to the platform. And while that is good enough and an improvement for Salesforce users, it is not best practice in 2015 anymore, where users need and demand more and faster information. Moreover Salesforce does not have the capability to tap into Hadoop scale BigData, where more and  more business relevant and critical (think IoT) information reside.
 
So a step forward for Salesforce users, still work to be done to catch up with the best of breed platforms. Stay tuned, we will be watching. 

 

Tags

analytics, cloud, dreamforce, financialforce, salesforce, visualization