Salesforce is arguably the leader of the enterprise cloud computing market, with social and mobile cloud technology that connects customers, partners and employees all in the cloud featuring low cost, low risk and fast results.  Since 1999 the company has slowly grown into its own, starting in a small San Francisco apartment to being named Forbes most Innovating Company in the World for the second consecutive year in 2012.

Salesforce gives users a wide variety of options that can be tailored to your exact needs through AppExchange offering paid and free solutions in a wide range of categories from sales and marketing to finance and analytics.  The software-free cloud solutions are also made for a wide range of industry—education and government to professional services and retail.

With more than 1000 apps to choose from, picking the best ones for data visualization is challenging considering the importance of such a decision.  When a company takes its data; which volume-wise is growing more and more every single day; and can turn it into meaningful information so that the company can benefit and make alterations as needed.  Not all of the best data visualization tools are available in the AppExchange, such as Chartio, and not all data visualization tools come with high price tags, like Business Intensity Maps, which is free.

There is a very wide range of data visualization products currently on the market, below you will five three fantastic options as well as one mobile option that is going to revolutionize the way that data is visualized.

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Business Intensity Maps

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Business Intensity Maps uses your Salesforce data to help managers and upper level executives visualize on a map the locations to focus on, and which locations are sufficiently represented.  As a free app, it is not as loaded with features as other apps are, but receives solid reviews with the biggest complaint being that the program is limited to the United States.

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OpDots

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OpDots “is an at-a-glance data visualization matrix that enables front line employees, managers and executives to see the real-time status of all support cases in full context.”  Forgoing traditional reports and dashboards, OpDots gives its customers their entire Salesforce picture in a single screen shot.  The program is accessible and useful for nearly every segment of an organization helping customer service reps, operations, tech, sales and service reps decide what they should do next creating a better business productivity.  OpDots is a reasonably priced option at $425 per user per year and in the short period that it has been on the market is highly reviewed and regarded.

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Chartio

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Chartio has hundreds of practical uses for small, medium and large enterprise.  Designed so Salesforce users can link their data to Chartio giving them the ability to review Salesforce data alongside with Google Analytics, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle all in the same dashboard or chart.  Users then can filter the data through date ranges and are no longer tied to data warehousing, “to receive real-time data to produce the most up-to-date charts.”  The real-time data provided by Chartio is above and beyond the capabilities of Salesforce, which gives users daily, weekly or monthly reports.  The program, and all of its exciting capabilities, comes with a high cost.  For a one user, one project user Chartio is $95 per month but quickly increases to $495 per month for 10 users and $2495 for 40 users and five projects.

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Zoomdata

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In January Zoomdata released it’s iPad app giving users the ability to “connect to internal and external data sources, combine, merge, and crunch data streams, visualize the results in real-time, and provide instant access to your colleagues.”  Zoomdata, now its in beta launch, is going to give users access to Twitter feeds and sample sales data and will connect to enterprise data source Salesforce.  This instant in-you-hand access is going to change the way that data is used, giving everyone from the ground up instant access to the data in an easy to understand interface.  Chris McGill, vice president of strategy and business development, says what sets Zoomdata apart is its focus first on mobile while other companies built their software browser first and with tablets outselling laptops, they’re getting in ahead of the stampede that will inevitably follow.

Data visualization is still a relatively new concept.  The astonishing volume of data that is created has far surpassed what was once imaginable four decades ago.  This data visualization creates both challenges as well as benefits; data overload is always a possibility but with the correct program is preventable while proper data visualization creates an edge for businesses to quickly see what they’re doing right, what they aren’t, and what needs work.

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