In 2 Sentences, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff Explains Why Something Called 'Analytics' Is The Hot New Thing

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Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff

Kevork Djansezian/Reuters

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff

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The big new product release of this year's Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual conference in San Francisco, was a new cloud analytics platform called "Wave."

Wave is Salesforce's first business intelligence and data analytics software. It collects and analyzes all the data sitting in the user's database and provides insights that could lead to better business decisions. It's also a lot faster and easier to use, compared to previous analytic softwares, allowing users to explore data more easily.

Although news of the product leaked earlier this week, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff officially launched the product during Tuesday's keynote speech. But just before revealing Wave for the first time, Benioff boiled down his thinking behind launching a new analytics tool to two simple sentences:

"Did you know 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years? There's going to be 10 times more mobile data by 2020, 19 times more unstructured data, and 50 times more product data by 2020."

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Benioff was referring to the IBM study that said 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, from social media and digital pictures to climate and sales transactions. Calling this a "data revolution," Benioff added that the abundance of data has in fact created this "data divide" for his customers, where they have no clue about what to do with all the data. He realized there was a clear need for a stronger data analytic software, and thus was born Wave.

With Wave, users can simply click on graphs to get immediate insights over their business. It analyzes data from lots of different angles, like which sales channel performs the best, across different regions or products. It can track each of the sales rep's performance and customer satisfaction data in real time, giving a complete picture of the team's performance.

Here's a video of what the new Wave analytics looks like on Salesforce partner FinancialForce's analytics platform. You'll notice the improved speed and visuals: