Salesforce has added yet another arrow to its quiver of analytics technologies with the acquisition of BeyondCore, a startup focused on automated advanced analytics for business users.
BeyondCore was founded by CEO Arijit Sengupta in 2004, but had only taken $9 million in series A funding so far while it worked to develop the product and land large initial customers. Twenty-three members of the Fortune 500 has used the product and the company has more than 20 awarded and pending patents.
Sengupta announced the Salesforce acqusition in a blog post:
BeyondCore’s small but dedicated team has already helped define the smart data discovery space ... and changed how customers look at analytics. But that was just a small part of our goal. From day one, we wanted to empower every business user with the power of analytics.
Its technology can analyze data from databases, Hadoop clusters and CSV files, automatically generating insights and serving them up through dashboards the company calls "stories." The stories include natural language narratives that explain the findings. BeyondCore 7, the company's upcoming release, runs the advanced analytics gamut, from descriptive to diagnostic to predictive and prescriptive capabilities.
The company unveiled an integration with Salesforce earlier this year, and subsequent talks among the companies apparently led to the deal.
BeyondCore is a good fit with Salesforce's aspirations for its analytics cloud and recent string of AI-related acquisitions, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "In both cases, BeyondCore's focus on data-analysis automation is a fit with the approach of embedding fresh insights and prescriptive analytics within applications, rather than forcing users to interpret data in a separate analytical environment. BeyondCore relies on machine learning and automated regression analysis to discover and surface correlations and patterns in data that are worthy of investigation."
However, Salesforce now has quite a collection of acquistions to knit together, notably including PredictionIO, another machine-learning focused company, which was acquired in February, Henschen notes. "The direction is clear, but only time will tell how soon Salesforce can fashion all this technology into cutting-edge capabilities delivered right within the context of its sales, service and marketing applications."
Salesforce customers can expect an update on exactly how all of that will work in less than two months, during the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
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