The state of Analytics

In 2015 Salesforce Research surveyed more than 2,000 business leaders, directors, and executives worldwide to discover areas where analytics usage is on the rise and understand how high-performing organizations approach analytics.

Here are four key findings from this research:

1. Analytics jumps to the forefront of business strategy. In the research, 90% of high performers say analytics is absolutely critical or very important to driving the company’s overall business strategy and improving operational outcomes.
2. Analytics use cases expand dramatically. High performers are 3x more likely than underperformers to be heavy analytics users, gleaning value via analytics in 10 or more disciplines. On average, high performers analyze more than 17 different kinds of data — almost double the number analyzed by underperformers.
3. The era of real-time analytics begins. As the pace of business continues to escalate, business leaders increasingly feel the need for agility and real-time decision-making. High performers are 5.1x more able than underperformers to gather timely business insights from their current analytics tools.
4. High performers embrace a culture of analytics. Adopting analytics for the everyday user, top teams are 2x more likely than underperformers to say half of their employee base uses analytics tools. Highly successful companies are building a culture of analytics where information is instantly accessible from the boardroom to the front lines. (If you want more details on above key findings and insight on the 2015 State of Analytics report, you may retrieve a complimentary copy from Salesforce Research here).

How can Salesforce Analytics Cloud help you on your analytics journey?

Given the above findings, it makes sense to take a deeper look at the Salesforce Analytics Cloud to see how it may help an organization to improve their analytics capabilities. If we look at the Salesforce Analytics Cloud we see four areas that are specific to above conclusions in the State of Analytics research:

1. Support business users

The Salesforce Analytics Cloud is designed to support business users when and wherever they need. The Salesforce Analytics Cloud has a very intuitive user interface and more importantly, it is available directly on the desktop, tablet, mobile as well as the Apple Watch. This allows business users to review and “slice and dice” any data wherever they are, and to share their findings on the go.

2. Access any data

Reports & Dashboards deliver a real-time look at your Salesforce data. But the Salesforce Analytics Cloud goes further to combine data from across your business, helping you explore any data, find new insights, and build dashboards that let data tell a story. Although combining data on itself is not unique, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud has a unique approach to this as it does not need a relational schema and allows for any type of data, structured or semi structured.

3. Data-driven actions

Analyzing data is one thing, but instantly acting on it is at least equally important. As the Analytics Cloud runs within the Salesforce Platform and can be directly connected to an implementation, Salesforce users can take action right from the Analytics Cloud and create tasks, update records, create chatter messages, share insights and more.

4. The Power of the Analytics Cloud

Businesses can get up and running with the Salesforce Analytics Cloud almost instantly. As the infrastructure like processing power, storage, back-up, virtualization and failover is instantly available from Salesforce. This infrastructure which is called Wave includes massively parallel processing, key-value pair data ingestion, search-based exploration and allows business to move through data at unprecedented speed

When your business is looking to improve performance based on analytics, it makes sense to look at the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. You may contact 4C directly to get a personal introduction, and a good understanding of its benefits. You can also visit the Salesforce Analytics technology site at for more information.