Benioff simply tweeted a photo of what appears to be the agenda for next month's Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual conference. But if you look closely, the first green box on Oct. 15 says, "Analytics Cloud Keynote."
Top secret v1 of the sched for Dreamforce #df14. Doesn't incl the 1,450 breakout sessions. Must bring food to attend. pic.twitter.com/J3a7jO2Qoy
- Marc Benioff (@Benioff) September 12, 2014
Salesforce currently does not offer an "Analytics Cloud" solution, so this could be an indication that Salesforce is close to revealing its first business intelligence and analytics software at the Dreamforce conference. There are tons of data already sitting in all of the Salesforce products, so this could be huge for all the Salesforce clients and third-party app producers who rely on Salesforce's data to build their own business-analytics tool.
In a note picked up by VentureBeat, Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard wrote, "This could represent a $500 million to a billion dollar opportunity over the next three to four years."
He added, "We are assuming that the analytics capabilities will feature more comprehensive reporting functionality with visual analytics, and drill down features. We think that this is based on the June 2013 acquisition of EdgeSpring. We believe that the relateIQ functionality will complement this nicely."
EdgeSpring, a company that offers business analytics data on areas like sales and financials, was acquired by Salesforce in June 2013. RelateIQ, acquired just two months ago by Salesforce, also offers a big data-driven platform where it automatically analyzes data to come up with the best-possible sales strategy.
Salesforce declined to comment on the matter, but told us to "join Dreamforce to hear more."