Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the Customer Success Platform and leading CRM company, announced Salesforce Wave for Big Data—enabling business users to unlock value from big data and gain entirely new customer insights with the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. With leading innovators Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks, New Relic, Informatica and Trifacta joining the Analytics Cloud ecosystem, companies can now deliver big data analytics to business users and transform every customer relationship.
The digital universe is doubling in size every two years and will multiply 10-fold between 2013 and 2020—from 4.4 trillion to 44 trillion gigabytes [1]. This torrent of Web searches, clicks, tweets, mobile app usage and connected sensors is creating new opportunities for companies to reinvent themselves through data analytics. However, legacy analytics software was never designed to manage the volume, variety or velocity of big data.
We live in a hyper-competitive world, and big data must deliver big value across every part of the business,” said Keith Bigelow, SVP & GM of Analytics Cloud, Salesforce. “Salesforce Wave for Big Data will connect the Analytics Cloud to the industry’s most comprehensive ecosystem of big data innovators—now every company can extend any data source to business users to transform every customer relationship.”
Fortunately, advancements in processing speeds, bandwidth and storage have led to the rise of technologies that are breaking new ground with big data. Innovators such as Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks and New Relic are now making it possible for developers, IT and data scientists to compute and process any data at massive scale. Despite this progress, the value of big data largely remains out of reach for sales, service, marketing and other business professionals—where its potential to inform every tactical and strategic decision may have the most impact on customer success and business performance.
Salesforce Analytics Cloud Delivers Big Data for the Rest of Us
Salesforce Analytics Cloud, powered by the Wave Platform, was designed to empower everyone to explore any data, uncover new insights and take action instantly from any device. And with Salesforce Wave for Big Data, leading innovators Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks and New Relic are joining the Analytics Cloud ecosystem to extend the volume, variety and velocity of big data to the business user—unlocking its value to transform every customer relationship. Now sales, service, marketing and other business professionals can discover correlations and patterns across any combination of transactional data—such as CRM, ERP, finance, and HR systems—and unstructured or semi-structured big data sets, all from within the Analytics Cloud. For example:
- Google offers a set of cloud big data services to ingest, process, store and analyze billions of rows and quickly run advanced queries without having to manage any infrastructure. Using Salesforce Wave for Big Data, a marketing manager can analyze the correlations between customer profiles in Salesforce and actual customer engagement data from the Google Cloud Platform—such as purchases, clickstream and mobile app usage—to optimize marketing spend and increase customer acquisition.
- Cloudera enables companies to deploy an enterprise data hub, the only secure analytics platform powered by Apache Hadoop, to store, process and analyze any data type at scale. Now a marketing exec will be able to identify patterns between a product usage log from Cloudera alongside CRM demographics to target the right customers for a loyalty campaign.
- Hortonworks provides an enterprise-grade data management platform based on 100 percent Apache Core that enables companies to use the power of Hadoop-drive analytics to optimize the performance of Hadoop cluster. Now a retail bank associate can explore massive amounts of operational, transactional and balance data to understand local economic trends to provide better banking services and counsel to each customer.
- New Relic delivers a software analytics platform that provides real-time insights on the performance of a company’s Web and mobile apps. As a result, companies can better understand how customers are engaging with their digital brand, including clickstreams, mobile activity, end-user experiences and transactions. Now correlations between customers’ behavior on a retail mobile app and history of customer purchases can be visualized together to enable a sales rep to improve cross-selling strategies.
Analytics Cloud Brings Together Business Users, Data Scientists and IT to Define New Data-Driven Customer Strategies
To enable data scientists and IT to transform big data into a usable form for business users, leading data preparation providers Trifacta and Informatica have also joined the Analytics Cloud ecosystem.
- Informatica provides an extensive library of prebuilt data integration transformation capabilities that run natively on Hadoop so IT can process all types of data at any scale—from terabytes to petabytes.
- Trifacta removes the burdens of working with big data by empowering data analysts and IT to discover, structure, clean and enrich data of all shapes and sizes in Hadoop, making it easier than ever to bring big data insights into the Analytics Cloud.
“Trifacta’s partnership with Salesforce extends the breadth of analysis businesses can perform in the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. By empowering all users to access and wrangle the rich data stored in Hadoop along with their Salesforce CRM data, we’re enabling organizations to uncover insights that lead to new sources of value. This closely maps to a growing trend we’re seeing in the big data space where the initial group of technical users is expanding to include a new class of data-driven business professionals. When diverse data from Hadoop is brought to the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, the insights available to these users grows exponentially.”
Analytics Cloud Ecosystem Extends Analytics for Every Business Need
Powered by the Wave Platform, Analytics Cloud brings together a dynamic user experience, indexed search and a powerful computing engine to explore any data source. Designed from the ground up to be open, more than 80 partners have now joined the Analytics Cloud ecosystem to extend analytics for every conceivable use case and enable data-driven companies to connect with customers in a whole new way.
Pricing and Availability
- Salesforce Analytics Cloud is generally available in English, with additional language support forthcoming.
- The Analytics Cloud mobile app is available on Apple iOS for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, with additional device support forthcoming.
[1] EMC Digital Universe Study, with data and analysis by IDC, April 2014
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