Salesforce Transforms Big Data Into Customer Success with the Salesforce Analytics Cloud

New Salesforce Wave for Big Data enables business users to unlock value from big data to gain new insights and transform every customer relationship

Leading innovators Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks, New Relic, Informatica and Trifacta join the Analytics Cloud Partner Ecosystem to extend big data analytics to every business user

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Salesforce

May 28, 2015, 08:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, May 28, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, today announced Salesforce Wave for Big Data—enabling business users to unlock value from big data and gain new customer insights with the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. With leading innovators Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks, New Relic, Informatica and Trifacta joining the Analytics Cloud Partner 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.

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 all forms of 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 Partner 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, a secure analytics platform powered by Apache Hadoop, to store, process and analyze any data type at scale. Now a marketing executive 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 Informatica and Trifacta have also joined the Analytics Cloud Partner Ecosystem.

Informatica delivers a leading cloud-based data integration and data preparation platform that enables citizen integrators, business analysts and IT developers to access, integrate and correlate transactional data, interaction data, and even machine data, at petabyte scale, for analysis within the Analytics Cloud.
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.

"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 connects 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."

"We're excited to join forces with Salesforce because it will enable Salesforce customers to easily make use of Google Cloud Platform and leverage the scale, speed, ease of use and power of Google Cloud Platform's big data services such as Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataflow," said Adam Massey, director of cloud ecosystem, Google. "This collaboration will provide customers with a complete view of their business and a fine-grained understanding of their customer interactions."

"Organizations are looking for new ways to capture and analyze the vast amounts of human and machine data," said John Kreisa, vice president of strategic marketing, Hortonworks. "Combining the power of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud with the Hortonworks Data Platform gives enterprises the ability to capture and analyze all of their data for new insights."

"We believe the New Relic Software Analytics Platform and the Salesforce Analytics Cloud will deliver powerful insights about companies' app performance, customer experience and business success," said John Gray, SVP of business development, New Relic. "Together we aim to enable companies through data-driven decision-making to build new digital experiences and connect with their customers."

"We live in an age of customer engagement where businesses are engaging with their customers through multiple social and mobile channels and trying to predict their interests and buying behavior," said Ronen Schwartz, vice president and general manager, Informatica Cloud. "This requires the preparation, integration and analysis of transactional data in CRM and ERP systems in conjunction with the clickstream and machine data generated by users on these social and mobile channels. The combination of Informatica Cloud and Informatica Rev delivers the only cloud native big data preparation and integration platform capable of dealing with this variety, complexity and scale of data for downstream analysis in Salesforce Analytics Cloud."

"We're extremely excited to partner with Salesforce and enable its users to wrangle the different shapes and sizes of big data for analysis in the Analytics Cloud," said Dan Niemann, vice president of worldwide field operations, Trifacta. "As organizations continue to expand their use of data to deliver competitive advantages in the market, the ability of these companies to empower business users to drive their own analysis of big data is critical to success. With this integration, business users are now able to prepare raw, complex data at scale using Trifacta and seamlessly deliver the output to the Analytics Cloud for downstream analysis."

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.

Additional Information

Learn more about the Salesforce Analytics Cloud http://www.salesforce.com/analytics-cloud/.
A free playground version of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud is available today for the desktop at https://www.salesforce.com/analytics-playground, and also on the Salesforce Analytics mobile app for Apple iOS for iPhone and iPad, available for download at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/salesforce-analytics/id916982402?mt=8.

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About Salesforce

Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: http://www.salesforce.com.

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^¹ EMC Digital Universe Study, with data and analysis by IDC, April 2014

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SOURCE Salesforce