A large part of big data is about how you bring different data sources into play and how to enable data leverage.

It is an age old problem with business intelligence (BI).

There’s a recognition of that in the first phase of big data use people were focused on visualisation to help people consume data.Visualisation became belle of ball in early stage mass adoption of big data use.

But, says Stephanie Buscemi, COO of Analytics Cloud at Salesforce, "We can ‘t forget about the heavy lifting of getting data in and seeing if it is any good."

In the new world focused on data preparation the question has shifted to: Is it good data? Can you make it good enough at speed to provide the business user with good context?

Predictive Analytics
"Cloud analytics is the package. We ingest it, store it, conduct transformation and calculations. What we don’t have is native predictive ability. We’re doing the predictive analytics in Heroku in very specific use cases like lead scoring."

"The true north is we’re creating intelligent apps and that’s the interaction with intersection with systems of record, automated and embedded in the workflow and integrated with business process. And it is collaborative giving people decision making capability on their own. There is native integration with Chatter, the Salesforce Enterprise Social Network to help people collaborate on insights and so can they take action."

The example offered is ‘I’m a sales VP. I see something. I see a problem. I see it is a particular set of reps, or on a particular set of solutions. If I have the right information at the right time, I can challenge the players and the stakeholders and we can change outcomes.’

"We have a configuration wizard, Sales Wave pulling data from multiple Salesforce objects. You can bring in data in a declarative manner. We’re releasing a self-service data console which will allow business user to do a minor amount of transformation – before seeing it in a Wave dashboard.

How mature is Salesforce Wave Analytics as a business?

As different cloud businesses emerge from Salesforce, they are incubated and nutured.

Bucemi says "we are out of the first phase. We ‘re out there in the market with price SKUs, fully selling."

She describes it as the teenage years. Wave analytics is a big strategic investment for Salesforce which is being brought to market in earnest in 2016.

Of course Salesforce won’t break out forecasts for different clouds but Salesforce Wave will be expected to deliver massive growth this year. To that end EMEA is a big market with lots of hires, the recruitment of a divisional leader for Wave and the building of a go to market. ISV pricing is in place and Buscemi says dozens of ISV partners are in place and building apps.

Bigger than CRM

The analytics market size is bigger than that for CRM she says. It has been around for decades in one form or another and Salesforce is betting that it can make the same success of Cloud based analytics that it did for CRM

"It is a huge market. And it is not just BI specialists who are engaging in the analytics conversation."

"Every day CEOs want to talk about this. The extent to which we’re serving CXOs is incredible. All recognise digital transformation means automating all data inputs, get intelligence, give business autonomy while maintaining compliance and governance."

"We are in the phase of enabling analytics. The final mile being ‘actionability."