Challenges hinder Salesforce Lightning, Wave adoption

In an effort to make analytics and application development more business user-friendly, Salesforce developed Salesforce Wave and Salesforce Lightning, both of which were announced at Dreamforce 2014, the annual conference for the cloud-based CRM software company.

Salesforce Lightning enables business users to develop their own applications; Salesforce Wave is a data analytics application that is built into Salesforce1, the CRM suite.

But, as Dreamforce 2015 approaches, some users are skeptical when deciding whether these products are worth investing in.

Gennie Stephens

Despite announcing the Lightning upgrade, Salesforce Lightning Experience, earlier this month, users worry that it poses a learning curve in terms of the user interface. While some users have expressed excitement about the data visualization and drilldown capabilities in Wave, the high price tag and existing investments in other analytics tools may hinder Wave adoption. Wave was touted last year as democratizing data analytics, making it easy for a sales manager to quickly see that certain reps haven't reached their quota and drill into the big picture to look at specific reps' sales and regions.

"Wave is only going to be adopted quickly by organizations that don't already have something [in place]" said Geneva Stephens, a Salesforce expert and program manager at a large airline. "I don't see the price justifying [a switch to Wave] and, truthfully, I have yet to meet anyone who's made those switches yet. It all comes down to the price."

With Wave, Stephens said that the company is moving in the right direction in terms of pushing a mobile-first data visualization application for business users that untethers them from a PC, but a major challenge is getting companies to abandon their existing analytics infrastructures.

Stephens also shared her thoughts on Salesforce's Health Cloud, which aims to help healthcare providers integrate patient data, but also has to overcome some of users' security concerns with cloud-based information and the challenge of aggregating disparate sources of data.

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