Salesforce.com Inc. announced updates to its Analytics Cloud on Thursday including new capabilities for mobile devices, and opened the doors on a new free trial of the software for mobile and desktop users.
Since San Francisco-based Salesforce.com launched its Wave Platform and the Analytics Cloud product that turns user’ data into easy-to-understand visualizations last October, it says that more than half of all queries have come from mobile devices. To cater to that trend, Salesforce is updating its Analytics Cloud app on the iOS and Android platforms with some new capabilities. Users will now be able to import their own data sets, analyze them, and build new dashboards to share analytics insights from their mobile devices.
Here are the new features that Salesforce.com is highlighting, expected to be released next month:
- The new Wave Mobile Connector will let users import raw data, saved in a CSV file, to the Analytics Cloud app. They can then view different visualizations of the data to try and identify trends and share those with their contacts. On the desktop, a Wave Connector add-in for Excel is also available to import data.
- The new Wave Mobile Dashboard Designer will allow users to create analytics dashboards from any data source on their phone. In the app, a dashboard consists of several visualizations of data in an interactive screen. (Eg. Your sales figures climbing closer to their goal for the month, alongside the number of qualified leads coming into your funnel.)
- Wave Links is a feature that allows other apps built on the Salesforce1 platform (including Salesforce1 itself) to connect with any data set, chart, or dashboard in the Analytics Cloud app. For users of other Salesforce products, they’ll be able to embed links in CRM records back to Analytics Cloud visualizations, for example.
The free trial version (or “playground” version as Salesforce calls it) of the Analytics cloud can be accessed via desktop, or on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices via the app as of today. The playground offers a tutorial, some example dashboards, and the ability to upload your own data and build dashboards if you register.
