Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff knows how to put on a show. The annual Salesforce conference, Dreamforce, takes over San Francisco for a week, with 1450 sessions, 400 companies presenting and 145,000 registered attendees. Amid the crowds and Uber surge pricing, Salesforce takes the opportunity to trot out their latest product launches and marketing messages. While there are plenty of flashing lights, smoke and mirrors, there is also substance and this year was no exception. With the launch of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, called Wave, and Salesforce1 Lightning, a development platform, Salesforce expands the reach and utility of their customer engagement platform. As with any new product launches, there is the excitement and there is the reality. While the overall functionality is not new in the development world, the impact on the trend in the consumerization of IT is more significant.
Doing the Wave
We've always been really good at creating data and lately we've been creating a LOT. According Benioff, 90% of ALL data has been created in the last two years. Enter Salesforce Analytics cloud, Wave. Aside from having a great "splash" page (pun by Salesforce Co-Founder Parker Harris), Wave looks to take business intelligence and predictive analytics out of the IT department and into the hands of sales and marketing teams. In theory this delivers power to the end users to not only have actionable intelligence in the palm of their hands but the ability to develop and customize on the fly. In practice, there are some challenges. Having worked in database administration for many years, I have an acute awareness of the challenges presented by data quality to reporting and analysis. There's an old saying: garbage in, garbage out. While the democratization of technology is a step in the right direction, challenges will remain in terms of data quality and analysis of the results. Bottom line: bad data will still equal bad results. In addition, just because you can create a report doesn't mean the results are meaningful, or even that you understand what they mean. There is still ground to cover in terms of understanding the data, interpretation of the results and finding the actionable insights.
Lightning Strikes Salesforce1
Application development no longer requires a computer science degree or any real knowledge of programming languages. So the launch of Salesforce1 Lightning as a "drag and drop" development platform is not necessarily big news in that respect. Rapid application development has been around for years, though as Marc Benioff addressed today, the democratization and consumerization of application development is indeed making it more accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise be participating. That said, this outlook is off the mark. The focus ought to be on the data, rather than the apps. We've had platforms to easily develop apps for years. So what makes this different? Again, it comes down to data. The democratization of application development has given more power and flexibility to organization, but often at the expense of overall organization data quality. What you get is data sprawl - redundant or incompatible datasets. So, the real exciting aspect of Lightning is not the rapid development platform, but that it allows rapid development on a common dataset.
Proliferation of cloud apps in business has created massive amounts of data. The better apps provide guidance and frameworks to enter data, but many are unstructured or disconnected. We are just seeing the beginning of cloud integrations and a move towards data quality and governance. Salesforce has again moved the needle to bring applications to the masses but they're still just scratching the surface of where we're headed. The mass of analytics-related companies in the exhibitor hall only emphasizes the fact that the future is all about the data.