Salesforce.com has become one of the most successful cloud applications. I am quite astounded by it’s mega hit penetration into myriad of industries.  It is being used by leading organizations not only to implement their customer relationship management system but also to develop their own applications running on cloud. But complete absence of meaningful analytical implementation flabbergasts me. Of course Salesforce.com has built in dashboards. But it’s analytical capability is very limited.

For example,if I need to segment my customers using clustering, how do I do that? How can I run simple regression analyses? Or how to perform predictive modeling? Suppose I have a historical data of my leads. Some of them were won while some were lost. The leads which were won, may have some common characteristics such as Age, Education, Job function etc. I can feed this data along with my current prospects to find out which of my current prospects are close to those leads and hence highly likely to be converted.

This is quite impossible to implement using native salesforce.com platform due to the limitations of Apex language and governor’s limit. However it is quite possible to take this data and feed it to R which may be running on another cloud such as Amazon Elastic Cloud and perform the required analysis.

Currently I am exploring the possibility of integrating salesforce data with R. I will keep you posted.