Salesforce.com: Analytics Can No Longer Be a Dream
September 23, 2012
Salesforce has helped revolutionize cloud computing for business, and its social media and collaborative technologies help advance business processes in sales, customer service and improve the interactions between employees, partners and customers. Salesforce has made great advancements in cloud, social and mobile technology, as I have assessed and my colleague did too.
I thought Dreamforce would be a good time to investigate the state of its analytics that have been evolving since last year. I have spent the last couple of decades in the analytics industry across business and IT and thought it might be useful to provide objective analysis on Salesforce Analytics so I went to educational sessions on the products and demonstrations of their software and use by customers. I also have noted in my analysis from the 2011 Dreamforce event that they needed to improve and was not one of its strengths. The role of business analytics is critical for Salesforce’s entire software portfolio, and especially for software within sales organizations, of which almost two-thirds (64%) plan to improve their sales analytics…
Salesforce has improved its dashboards and reports, making them easier to create and simpler to navigate. It has hired expertise from other business intelligence companies to energize its efforts. The company’s Summer ’12 release included key technical advancement in joining reports, filters and bucketing data for analysis and presentation. It included calculated columns, which let users create new derived metrics more easily than they could if they had to work with a database analyst. What Salesforce outlined for the future, some of which it says will be available in the Winter ’13 release, is more filtering and sorting on aggregates. Users will be able to lay out charts in a dashboard from built reports and create combination charts with line over bar charts or specifically laid-out matrix reports. It also is planning to provide trending analytics through storing the changed data but only plans to store for up to one year. Salesforce was proud to provide shared folders across devices, but subfolders are not planned, which for anyone managing BI content across teams or categories is not acceptable.
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