By Jim Lundy
#DF14 is here and Salesforce has already pre-briefed the press on its new Analytics Cloud Platform, Wave, which it will formally introduce at Dreamforce DF14 this week. The question is, is this new platform a move to continue to monetize the Salesforce ecosystem and also offer a predictive platform at the same time?
This blog is about Salesforce and the other tech titans that are in the biggest race in modern computing: the race to predictive and cognitive computing.
#DF14: The Rise of Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud
We think that Wave will be popular, because of the visual nature of what it offers, and because so many managers live in Salesforce dashboards. From a predictive perspective, it looks like it is still early days for Wave, which will be dependent on other partners, including predictive app providers Lattice, Gainsight, Fliptop, Predixion, Wise.io and others such as Infer, Model N, and SpringCM to provide valuable insight that drives action.
There are many other partners that will be involved, but so far, of the predictive partners that are identified on the Salesforce slide, most are not using Salesforce to develop their apps. These partners will help make Wave a more valuable service and Salesforce is counting on Wave for another round of revenue growth.
#DF14: Salesforce vs. Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Apache
This brings us back to the biggest race in computing. While Salesforce is just announcing its Analytics Cloud, today, Google is battling IBM, Microsoft, and Apache Mahout (Open Source) in the race to enable developers to develop predictive apps, via their respective PaaS platforms, some having machine learning as a service.
Aragon predicted at the beginning of 2014 that we see predictive business applications emerging and that by the end of 2015, 50% of software applications will be predictive. The announcement by Salesforce will only add fuel to the race to go predictive.
The stakes are very high and just as predictive apps come online, cognitive apps and services will be here. Cognitive services are applications that can give highly accurate recommendations and suggested actions. Essentially, the computer learns facts and processes incoming data against those facts to form a hypothesis, which in turn drives recommendations to humans.
In cognitive, IBM is the only major tech titan shipping a cognitive application today (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Race to Predictive and Cognitive. Google, IBM, and Microsoft are in a race to offer predictive and cognitive applications and services.
As we have said in our research, the race to build predictive apps is on. The question is, what role will Salesforce play with its new Wave platform?
There will certainly be a lot of news coming out this week at #DF14. Developing…