Wave analytics app announced

Reports reveal  that Salesforce announced a new Wave analytics app today called Sales Wave Analytics, the first in a line of what the company is calling ‘role-based’ packaged apps for the Wave platform.

Sources say today’s announcement is the first in a line of apps that will address specific problems and give customers a packaged app to solve a particular sales issue. This app approach lets customers take advantage of Wave technology without actually buying the whole underlying platform.

According to some reports, it’s aimed at small to medium size businesses or departments, which won’t necessarily want to get their hands dirty getting under the Wave hood and building their own applications. This is a way to give these customers the advantages of Wave without having to actually understand (or pay for) its underpinnings.

“We don’t want to replace Excel, but it doesn’t belong in the mix when a sales manager is trying to get visibility into his [or her] pipeline,” a Salesforce official explained.

The idea behind this app is to provide a highly visual roadmap of the pipeline, which sales managers can easily slice and dice and dive into as needed. From there, they can communicate and issue specific tasks to the sales team based on the data to drive the quota, even including specific data points in the message.