Just days after snubbing Microsoft’s $55 billion takeover offer, Salesforce.com, Inc. has unveiled Salesforce Wave for Big Data, a new tool designed to help business users make sense of their information stores using the Salesforce Analytics Cloud.

Salesforce first showed off Wave, a tool designed to pull data into Salesforce’s cloud and generate business-friendly analytics, in October last year. Now, the company is touting the next step – using Wave as an analytics service for data stored in Hadoop and similar repositories, with the idea of bringing external data sources to the platform.

Salesforce Wave for Big Data integrates a number of popular Big Data tools into Wave, including those from Cloudera Inc. and Hortonworks Inc., New Relic Inc., and, biggest of all, Google, via the data services offered with its Google Cloud Platform.

The move affords Salesforce two big advantages. On the one hand, it gives the company a new way to add value to anyone who’s investing in one of those other platforms or services. Second, it helps push Salesforce deeper into new, but not unfamilar territory.

Salesforce is essentially building its own take on the data lake solution – offering live data-service utilities that give companies a way to extract value from data that’s either stored deep in its bowels, or constantly pouring into its servers in real-time, without the need to carry out laborious ETL transformations.

As part of the plan, Salesforce is teaming up with Informatica Corp. and Trifacta Inc. to give users more fine-grained control over how their data can be prepared and accessed.

Throwing down the gauntlet

Yesterday’s announcement feels a lot like the deal Salesforce made with Microsoft last year, where the Redmond firm agreed to integrate the former’s tools into Office 365. However, while that deal lets customers use Office as a front end to present Salesforce’s back end, Salesforce now seems to be offering its analytics and business-insight tools as a front end to other company’s back ends.

Interestingly, it’s an approach that lands Salesforce in direct competition with other Big Data analytics solutions that have been doing the same thing for a while. Business Intelligence firm Tableau Software Inc., for example, does a very solid job of generating visual analytics from a wide variety of data sources – including data from Salesforce itself.

Salesforce says more than 80 partners have joined the Analytics Cloud ecosystem, which is now generally available in English; additional language support is forthcoming, it says. The Analytics Cloud mobile app is available on Apple iOS for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, with additional device support in the works.

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