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I was at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference this week to hear about the latest advancements from the cloud computing software giant. 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 has 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.
A significant number of issues point to a lack of maturity in its efforts; for instance, users cannot change colors and related themes in business charts. As one customer said, having lots of charts on the screen with the same color array does not work. If you read my recent rant on the pathetic state of dashboards then you should realize that the current practice of placing a series of charts on a screen is now antiquated and ineffective at informing business. It fails to provide the intelligence business needs to have the information spell out in English what is the changing metrics and provide guidance on what is most important to act on and is not contextual to a specific role. Salesforce laid out plans to expand dashboards across mobile technologies to ensure those devices can keep pace with its overall platform and accessibility advancements. But Salesforce must focus on its presentation and its metrics and make sure to not fixate on key performance indicators, which is not the only or best presentation approach, as I have written.
I stepped back and thought about our research, which found a high priority on simpler and more intuitive analytics, according to 89 percent of the more than 2,800 organizations we researched in our business analytics benchmark. Business is also looking for methods to search for specific information within business analytics (83% of organizations) and visual and data discovery in (78%). In addition, 69 percent of analysts across line-of-business areas spend the majority of their time with data-related tasks. The requirement to blend data across sources is still a major inhibitor; 88 percent of organizations use spreadsheets universally or regularly. Salesforce is not focusing closely enough on overcoming these issues, which is an indicator of their understanding the market and resources available to address them.
While Salesforce struggles to advance its basic business intelligence capabilities and develop the analytics its customers want, its partners in business intelligence have a great opportunity to meet the demand for intuitiveness and capabilities. Integrating independent business intelligence providers into Salesforce is not always easy but most have provided a way to have it seamlessly be part of the application. The challenge is more around direct access to the Salesforce data that requires development and use of its proprietary API and is not a standard database connectivity method. I walked the Cloud Expo at Salesforce Dreamforce conference and sat in on these vendors demonstrations and it was clear that the size of the audience and capabilities presented that they are addressing the gaps in Salesforce analytics.
Nevertheless, a large number of business intelligence and analytics providers are partnering with Salesforce to capitalizing on this gap of sophistication. The list of certified partners on the AppExchange includes BIRST, Cloud9 Analytics, Domo, Gooddata, InetSoft, QlikView and RoamBI, along with vendors I could not find in AppExchange, including MicroStrategy and Tableau, though they were at Dreamforce demonstrating capabilities that are not yet certified or listed in the AppExchange. Even KXEN was demonstrating how to apply predictive analytics to help guide sales opportunities through its predictive lead scoring.Our firm has been tracking these vendors, and many can plug the gaps in Salesforce’s offerings, but it requires effort to integrate them and make them easily accessible from within Salesforce. Among those business intelligence vendors that do not have direct API access to Salesforce, some have partnered with data integration vendors such as Informatica, Information Builder iway and SnapLogic, who can help get data from Salesforce and place into a database. This need for improving access to data in the cloud was a critical factor for investment according to our research.
Salesforce makes it difficult for users to find their partners. The AppExchange lacks a category for analytics or business intelligence, but if you’re smart enough to navigate into the sales category you can find the vendors, which indicates the company assumes that everyone is just looking for sales analytics though those have a lot of room for improvement. If you navigate into customer service, marketing or other business and technology areas you cannot find any categorization to make it easier to find analytics vendors. This is a sad state of affairs for a company whose platforms, including Force.com and Database.com, are being used to generate a broad range of applications that need analytics, including those from its partners.
I am not sure how Salesforce’s efforts in analytics are going to evolve, but it’s not keeping pace with about a dozen of other providers it partners with and should be addressing the part of our Value Index assessment including usability, manageability and adaptability. This means customers either must be very patient and wait to get capabilities in the coming years that other vendors already provide, or they can transition to Salesforce partners sooner rather than later. Salesforce has had a rough go in trying to make analytics a separate product to charge for, then realizing analytics is just a set of feature it can provide in the premium editions of its products, as communicated in its own product blog. Nevertheless, Salesforce needs to better present its portfolio of partners to keep its customers satisfied and not ignore partners in its presentations and communications.
The pressure for better analytics will get larger, not smaller. If it does not make an acquisition to advance its analytics technology, Salesforce may have a rough ride ahead.
Regards,
Mark Smith
CEO & Chief Research Officer
The demand for business information on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets continues to increase, while the technology to support it has not. In our benchmark research on information applications, only 11 percent of organizations said they are very satisfied with their ability to provide such information, and their top two complaints with existing technologies are that they are too slow and not adaptable or flexible. The unique aspects of mobile technology, from the small screen size to the use of gestures for interaction, make for a complex technological problem.
Roambi is a technology vendor active in this space, having been preparing and presenting rich information on Apple iPhone and iPad devices for several years, as I have written. Our firm recognized one of Roambi customers, Life Technologies, for business mobility in our 2011 Leadership Awards. It provides digital mobile access to rich information applications through Roambi Flow, which enables users to assemble information into a presentation, publication, application or whatever grouping they need to share with others. Roambi Flow can embed content, from text to images, to tell a story in a presentation or briefing book, or to create digital publications on a routine basis. Now, as the demand for delivering digital publications expands to marketing collateral, annual reports, market research and other documents, organizations need to further customize content for an unlimited number of people. To meet this need, Roambi has released Roambi ESX, which builds upon existing products Roambi Analytics and Roambi Flow to provide the means to reach a larger audience. Roambi ESX not only enables organizations to publish to their existing audiences of employees and customers but also provides commercial opportunities to generate new revenue streams. For example, organizations can create a branded experience by using a custom logo or graphic that users see when they review an application for download. Roambi has learned from its experience in publishing software to the Apple App Store and now enables organizations to publish their own applications. With this step, Roambi has entered the mobile information and application platform market.
Roambi also recently released an extension to Roambi Flow to help businesses publish content from existing presentations that they already use on a daily basis. Roambi Present addresses shortcomings of the original applications, including the difficulty and slowness of assembling information into views and deploy them, as cited by almost half (47%) of research participants. Presentations made in Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint can be starting points for enrichment through interactive analytics. Typically businesses create presentations using these tools, then save them in presentation mode or in static versions through Adobe Acrobat. Roambi Present can examine an existing presentation, capture the slides’ formatting, layout and content, and prepare it for enrichment within Roambi Flow. Then, through placement of Roambi Analytics or its reports into the slides, users can present supporting content as part of the presentation. Roambi also supports embedding hot spots in link images, such as maps, to charts. As well Roambi’s security prevents access to a presentation or data from those who are not authorized. This expansion will make Roambi more popular with business analysts who use Microsoft Office to create and email presentations.
This is a refreshing approach to helping businesses assemble and deploy richer information to mobile devices, and it comes as businesses increase their use of tablets, which are often the primary computing vehicle for many classes of employees. In fact, our business analytics benchmark research found that 38 percent of organizations demand analytics and metrics be available via mobile technologies. With Roambi, they can deliver this information in presentations without help from the IT department, which reduces the time it takes to get information to those who need it. Roambi exceeds the capabilities of many other technology vendors in the business intelligence space, who focus on publishing charts from existing reports within an IT-managed environment; today, that does not provide the flexibility or depth of content that many organizations need. If Roambi could add support for collaboration from within its deployed applications and also add Android mobile technology support they could grow even faster.
As organizations realize that Microsoft Office and its business intelligence tools do not meet their emerging information needs or suit how their business analysts operate, they will look for tools like Roambi Flow and Roambi Present to help engage their mobile audiences. As organizations look to brand and deliver their own custom information applications, Roambi ESX will help them quickly reach a large and growing mobile audience. Roambi continues to advance the technology that businesses need to meet their pressing cycles for both accessing and publishing information and analytics digitally across mobile technologies. It establishes a new standard for mobile information platforms with its interactive and visual discovery tools and its process to assemble and deploy publications, presentations and applications.
Regards,
Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer
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