Salesforce.com spent $2.5 billion to purchase ExactTarget to reinforce its analytics capabilities, so don’t expect it to do another pricey acquisition.
Is Salesforce.com doing enough to satisfy the analytics needs of its customers? It is a question that came up not once but twice in Q&A sessions with company executives finally month’s Dreamforce conference.
The response offered by CEO Marc Benioff and executive VP of goods Kendall Collins was that Salesforce is doing plenty to fulfill the demand.
“We’re an enormous analytics provider through millions of millions of dashboards which are being generated by all of our customers,” said Benioff. “Reports are going out and we’re providing an important amount of decision support.”
Salesforce is totally pursuing deeper analytics where it’s sales, service, and marketing applications are concerned. Benioff pointed to deep campaign analytics offered by ExactTarget, the promoting automation and campaign management firm Salesforce acquired for a whopping $2.5 billion in June. After which there are the platform-level capabilities, which include APIs utilized by AppExchange partners including Birst, Good Data, and others, to offer deeper-level BI and analytics. (The AppExchange “Analytics” catalog currently lists 33 options built on Force.com.)
[Want more on Dreamforce announcements? Read Salesforce.com’s Salesforce1 Platform: a more in-depth Look.]
Drawing a line, Benioff said Salesforce doesn’t intent to head into the “traditional, horizontal analytics market,” where he lumped data warehousing vendors and the likes of SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion, and other “broad based solutions.”
“It is not that we are not eager about that area — it is usually a future opportunity,” he said. “But it isn’t where we’re today.”
Highlighting the mobile-focused Salesforce1 platform announcement, executive VP Collins noted that the various sales, service, and marketing dashboards served up by Salesforce and ExactTarget will now be accessible “on all devices and form factors, right out of the box.” He also hinted at deeper drill-down reporting and announcements yet to come back.
The “stay tuned” hint may need been a connection with the “Predictive Intelligence” capability introduced tomorrow at Dreamforce as element of the Salesforce1 Service Cloud upgrade. This capability recognizes common service questions or complaints by analyzing similar cases. It’s said to foretell automatically the perfect response and the correct experts that service reps should depend on to aid customers.
In another predictive advance, the Salesforce1 Sales Cloud upgrade introduced at Dreamforce adds core capabilities from Pardot, the promoting automation company acquired in 2012 by ExactTarget. Pardot was once just another a type of dozens of AppExchange analytics partners, but now its capabilities, including predictive lead scoring and lead nurturing, are built into the Sales Cloud.
Does all this still leave room for deeper capabilities? Predictive marketing applications firm Lattice says yes. Where Salesforce looks at data within its own sphere, Lattice says certainly one of its differentiators is tapping into transactional systems and external data sources to assist predict next customers, next good leads, and next customers prone to churn. Transactional systems like ERP bring purchase information, while external sources add data points, including credit scores, and within the B2B context insight on hiring trends at companies as indicated by LinkedIn activity.
“In a massive enterprise, a salesman could have a customer that’s in 50 different locations that has 25 different touch points captured in the Salesforce database,” said Eric Berridge, CEO of Salesforce integrator Bluewolf, in an interview with InformationWeek. “What predictive analytics can begin to do is analysis on customers which might be able to attrite, or that need more resources, or that do not have certainly one of your products that would be an excellent fit. It’s going to point your sales organization or your service organization on the customers who need attention.”
There will always be more that Salesforce.com could do to reinforce its analytics capabilities, but don’t expect it to make another acquisition anytime soon. After spending $2.5 billion on ExactTarget, Benioff was talking up the necessity to “balance profitability and growth” at Dreamforce. With out a profits to indicate in accordance with standard accounting principles (the corporate reported a $124 million loss in its third quarter on revenues of $1 billion), there’ll be more balancing to do before Salesforce can push its own broad-based standard for deep analytics.
IT groups need data analytics software that’s visual and accessible. Vendors have become the message. Also within the State Of Analytics issue of InformationWeek: SAP CEO envisions a younger, greener, and cloudier company. (Free registration required.)
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