Salesforce Adds Analytics Dashboard, Visualization

Salesforce rolled out an “analytics cloud” this week that is touted as tying analytics to businesses processes and workflows so users can act directly on business intelligence from its new Wave Actions dashboard.

The San Francisco-based customer relationship manager (CRM) specialist said Monday (Sept. 14) its Wave Analytics dashboard would also deliver Wave visualizations across its entire cloud analytics platform. Meanwhile, new Wave analytics applications also will be developed by independent software vendors as a way to extend the Salesforce platform to more users and industry sectors.

The knock on current analytics software and visualization tools is that they often deliver static, quickly outdated reports and come equipped with complicated graphical interfaces. That, Salesforce said, prevents business users from leveraging analytics data. Hence, the company said it would include Wave visualizations across its entire platform.

It also said Wave visualizations would provide metrics like sales team performance, lead volumes and conversation rates in real time via its new dashboard. Along with running reports, Salesforce said the new dashboard could resize or rearrange components as needed.

The embedded dashboards are designed to extend beyond operational CRM performance metrics to include, for example, year-on-year trends and key performance indicators from a range of data sources.

Further, a Wave dashboard or chart can now be embedded into any Salesforce record or object, eliminating the need to leave an existing workflow. Hence, a Wave Analytics dashboard could be embedded and analyzed within a customer account record, the company said.

Salesforce claims a Wave partner ecosystem of more than 80 companies. It also expects 13 software vendors to demonstrate new Wave Analytics apps at an upcoming company event. The “pilot” apps include a “quote-to-cash” feature as well as an analytics package that tracks customers from quotes and contracts to orders and revenues. Another would analyze financial and supply chain performance data as a way to improve customer service.

Salesforce said Wave Actions is expected to be generally available in October, and will be included with any Wave Analytics Platform license. Meanwhile, the reports and dashboard functionality on the Wave visualization tool is available now in preview. It is also expected to be generally available in October at no additional cost to current Salesforce cloud users.

Meanwhile, Wave embedded dashboards are generally available now and will be included with any Wave license. Sales Wave Analytics App is currently in pilot testing with select customers and is expected to be generally available in English in October. Service Wave Analytics App is currently in pilot with select customers and expected to be generally available in English in early 2016, the company said.

Last October, Salesforce launched its Wave Analytics Cloud, a hosted analytics platform designed to give non-technical users in sales, marketing, and service positions access to information that improves sales and boosts customer satisfaction and retention. The NoSQL-based system garnered favorable reviews, especially for its self-service approach and the schema-less way it ingests data.

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