Bosses at Salesforce.com have cashed in millions of pounds worth of shares as the company ramps up its attack on Oracle, SAP and IBM by investing in a massive analytics service.
Chief executive Marc Benioff (pictured) has offloaded 40,000 shares, raising $2.5m (£1.6m); chief operating officer George Hu sold 7,000 for $441,000 (£278,000) and co-founder Parker Harris flogged 11,333 shares for $712,000 (£450,000).
The new service, dubbed Salesforce Wave, is designed to boost the CRM giant’s stake in the business intelligence market. Through this new cloud offering, the “software-as-a-service” specialist intends to provide customers with predictive analytics features by integrating its own customer relationship cloud offering.
Salesforce Wave is designed to make it easier for everyone to explore data, uncover new insights and take action instantly from any device; it sees the company expand beyond CRM, sales and marketing and customer service.
The new service is different from other approaches to analytics as it is search-based. The company claims this allows for rapid, iterative exploration by users who are in search of answers to questions.
Salesforce is launching Wave with more than 30 partners, ranging from consulting firms such as Accenture and Deloitte to data-integration companies Informatica and Dell Boomi.
The worldwide business analytics software market generated $37.7bn (£24bn) in sales during 2013, and is forecast to grow a 9.4% year on year to 2018, when it will be worth $59.2bn (£37bn).
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Salesforce chiefs cash in hundreds of thousands of pounds in shares http://t.co/OwKYMrFS22 #CRM #businessintelligence #directmarketing