During his keynote session, Salesforce.com CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff brought video game publishing giant Activision’s CIO Robert Schmid on stage.  They talked about how the Salesforce Service Cloud enables it to meet unique challenges facing a gaming platform where 5 million concurrent users of a total 50 million are generating terabytes of data a day, every day. Later, during a press Q&A session, Salesforce Executive VP of Applications Alex Dayon explained how that challenge represents the cloud company’s approach to analytics and big data.

Dayon, who spent the 1990s with business intelligence (BI) Business Objects, since snapped up by SAP, explained how the old analytics model fails – it can tell you what happened before, but not what’s happening now. In a business landscape that includes social networks and mobile applications with data streaming in 24/7 , that’s like a “rear-view mirror” for your business, Dayon says, and can result in faulty decisions or a too-belated change in course.

Twitter is merciless, it moves fast, and data warehouses just aren’t going to cut it anymore. It’s time for business intelligence and analytics to deal with the “real world,” Dayon says.

Marcel LeBrun, SVP and GM for the Salesforce Radian6 social marketing suite, concurred, highlighting how his product draws from all corners of the public social web, including relatively recent comers like Google+ and Pinterest to help businesses make informed decisions. Moreover, the Radian6 Insights platform offers semantic social conversation analytics on an ala carté, app store-style basis – for instance, customers can add the Klout influence algorithm to the report.

Services Angle

Something that struck me as noteworthy is that both Dayon and Lebrun were clearly discussing big data topics – in both cases the crunching of tremendous amounts of social data to produce useful insights – but largely shied away from the term. Dayon, for his part, acknowledged that “big data” is the buzzword du jour, but preferred to talk in terms of analytics and BI.

It’s almost the antithetical approach of a company like Yammer, which earlier this week added a “big data” analytics dashboard that, well, wasn’t. Regardless of the terminology used, it seems that Salesforce is definitely thinking along big data lines and developing its offering accordingly – but as Benioff has made clear time and time again, Salesforce’s marketing strategy hinges on social.

Finally, it’s worth noting that big data wasn’t just discussed with executives – at least one developer session focused on integrating the Apache Hadoop big data platform with Force.com cloud applications.