5 Requirements for Effective Self-Service Data Preparation
Looking to spur adoption of analytics services in the cloud, Salesforce today unveiled a version of its cloud analytics application specifically designed for organizations that sell products via an extended distribution channel.
Ketan Karkhanis, vice president of product management for Wave Analytics Cloud at Salesforce, says Wave Analytics for Community Cloud is designed to be a complementary service to the existing Salesforce Community Cloud service, which Salesforce developed to make it easier for organizations to build an online community around a particular product or service.
With Wave Analytics for Community Cloud, organizations can now share dashboards with their partners that highlight, for example, adoption trends.
Karkhanis notes that most partners tend to be smaller organizations that can’t really afford to invest in building an analytics application to support a particular product or service. Even if they could, Karkhanis adds, it’s unlikely they would have access to the data needed to power it. Wave Analytics for Community Cloud is designed to make it simpler for a manufacturer or provider of a service that is at the heart of a particular channel community to easily share data.
Naturally, the better informed those partners are, the more engaged they will become. As such, Karkhanis says Salesforce is making a case that Wave Analytics for Community Cloud will essentially pay for itself by driving increased sales via channel partners. At the same time, Salesforce also expects usage of its analytics cloud service to increase because most products and services these days are sold via extended distribution channels.
The degree to which that occurs will naturally vary widely. But, as Karkhanis notes, most business partners are flying blind today. Given that reality, any shedding of light on what is occurring with the end customer might constitute something of a miracle in terms of visibility into the business.
