(Editor’s note: The following story appeared previously on DestinationCRM.com on October 15, 2014. The full story is available there.) 

Salesforce.com in mid-October introduced Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, a platform for designing sales, service, and marketing analytics or custom mobile analytics apps.

Wave Analytics Cloud will help companies explore any data source, uncover new insights, and take action instantly from any device. The platform brings together a dynamic user experience, indexed search, and a computing engine in a single cloud analytics environment. With Wave’s schema-free architecture, data doesn’t have to be presorted or organized before it can be analyzed. In addition, business analysts can create mash-ups of third-party data sources in a single dashboard. As business users derive insights, dashboards can be shared via Salesforce Chatter and new workflows and tasks can be triggered.

Wave is natively integrated with the Salesforce1 Platform and shares the same single sign-on, data security, and compliance features. Users can drag and drop data from Salesforce, including data from partner apps built on the platform, to deploy sales, service, and marketing analytics apps. 

In addition, developers and IT can use Wave APIs and other data connectors to connect to third-party data sources. 

More than 30 Salesforce.com partners have already joined the Wave Analytics Cloud ecosystem. They include companies such as Informatica, Accenture, Appirio, Deloitte Digital, Dun & Bradstreet, Lattice Engines, and Xactly.

“I couldn’t be more excited about it,” said Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff to an audience of 145,000 on-site attendees and more than 5 million online viewers.

According to Benioff, the Wave Analytics product is the brainchild of Alex Dayon, president of products at Salesforce. Dayon said the Wave product was two years in the making, and “brings all of a business’ data together in one platform.”

Parker Harris, a Salesforce.com cofounder, called Wave Analytics Cloud “a great new addition to the Salesforce platform.”

But for all the hype, many attendees were still uncertain about Wave’s capabilities and business cases.

Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari, for example, stated in an email that “Salesforce Wave provides a great way for enterprises to view sales activities in a more holistic way, but it’s only as good as the data that is fed into it. Manual inputs from sales reps are no longer enough. It’s about layering that information with real-time data from each salesperson’s email, meetings, and relationship activities. Fully integrated analytics solutions, leveraging data science, will then provide actionable insights that optimize revenue and business performance.”

Still, anticipation is high for the Wave Analytics Cloud. “The march toward better analytics is so important and transformative in how companies will deliver customer service,” says Keith Dawson, principal analyst on Ovum’s Customer Interaction Team. “Now you don’t have to be a highly trained data scientist to get insights from analytics. A person closer to the business systems can use [analytics] to get to the truth about all aspects of the business.”

Wave Analytics Cloud wasn’t the only product release made at DreamForce. Harris also introduced Salesforce1 Lightning, so named because it contains “all the tools to build mobile apps lightning fast,” he said.

Salesforce1 Lightning comes with prebuilt, drag-and-drop components, such as buttons, rich text, calendars, lists, maps, and more, but businesses can also use custom-built components.

Also new for Salesforce.com is the Customer Success Platform, designed to bridge the gap between companies and customers by bringing together cloud apps for sales, service, marketing, social communities, the Wave Analytics cloud, and mobile app development, all on the Salesforce1 Platform. —Leonard Klie