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Salesforce adds Wave apps to Analytics Cloud ecosystem

The first app to hit the portfolio is Sales Wave Analytics, which draws on the CRM giant's roots in the sales space.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
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Salesforce.com is adding apps to the Wave Analytics Cloud ecosystem.

Unveiled last October at Dreamforce 2014, Wave is aimed at a broader subset of business users beyond sales and marketing professionals. It's designed with a mobile-first experience for downloading data from any source.

With the latest iteration of the platform, apps are built on top of Wave and delivered by Salesforce. Unsurprisingly, the first app to hit the portfolio is Sales Wave Analytics, which draws on the CRM giant's roots in the sales space.

The app is designed to help a sales team accelerate deals and assign tasks at the point of insight, on a mobile device. It is currently in pilot with select customers and is expected to be generally available later this year.

Salesforce has five clouds, and Wave marks the sixth. According to Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce Analytics Cloud, it's also the fastest growing cloud Salesforce has launched to date. She credits the platform's success to the fact that employers can use it to put insights into the hands of every individual in an organization.

"What we had been doing with CRM was making technology that was easy to use and essentially it was customizable to a customer's business needs," Rosenman said. "There was one area poised for disruption by making that area open to more users. And that is analytics."

Since its inception, Salesforce has pitched Wave as way to tap into legacy data in an enterprise and make it digestible for the regular business user. Much of that was accomplished by taking cues from other technology companies, as well demands in the consumer space.

"We looked at what Google is doing with search-based query, and we put that in the Wave platform," Rosenman added. "All of these new ways of taking action and doing business ... we put those technologies into the Wave platform and turned the analytics experience on its head."

The Sales Wave Analytics app will be available on Apple iOS for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, but Salesforce is planning additional device support down the road.

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