Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

It’s a revolutionary customer and business analytics platform that’s optimised for mobile use and brings flexible customer analytics to everyone in your company. It works with any data, from any data source, and it will change the way your company answers critical questions. Einstein Analytics allows you to explore in ways legacy analytics can’t because you can:

• Connect directly to your CRM data and execute on insights directly in Chatter.
• Automatically analyse millions of rows of data and get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery.
• Explore data quickly and automate actions with prebuilt apps.
• Use mobile to act, whether you're on Android or iOS.

Recently developed discovery tools offer better charting capabilities than traditional business intelligence, but they fall short when it comes to search speed, the need to build schemas, and discriminating against new data types. Plus they aren’t mobile, and they’re often deployed on-site.

Einstein Analytics, on the other hand, is designed to bring true business intelligence to every business user in every line of business: from sales reps to service reps to marketing managers and beyond. It is 100% mobile — not just for tablets and not as an afterthought.

It also allows you to maintain control of your data. With some other solutions, data analysts will download data and store it locally — taking governance out of your company’s hands. With analytics from Salesforce, you can ensure that critical company data stays in your system and isn’t exposed through substandard security.

Many of our large enterprise customers have asked the same thing, only to discover that Einstein Analytics works more like a search engine that allows them to instantly explore data in any direction, rather than a spreadsheet that requires time-consuming, headache-inducing manual revisions. They’ve also discovered that real mobile access to data is a powerful business accelerator that can help employees do better work, faster.

Not all analytics tools are created equal. Einstein Analytics is next-generation business intelligence software designed to provide critical answers at consumer speed. It’s intuitive, empowering, and built for mobile. It lets everyone explore data in ways they couldn’t with legacy analytics, which leads to discussions, decisions, and transactions that are driven by insight, instead of instinct.

With Einstein Analytics, you can deliver tailored analytics experiences to sales, service, marketing, and IT business users so that they can take action quickly without getting bogged down by complex dashboards.

The short answer: It’s night and day. The longer answer: Relational databases require deep-level integration across schemas and between datasets. This is difficult and time-consuming. Conversely, Einstein Analytics is a mobile tool that lets you explore information like you would with a search engine. This creates faster time to value, and more flexible data visualisation and navigation.

• Relational databases are schema-based. Schemas are based on assumptions about questions that need to be asked ahead of time, and require preaggregation due to long query times. This forces rigid searches and questions, preventing users from exploring unique opportunities on the spot.
 Instead, Einstein Analytics uses search-inspired technology to mash up data across silos, to unify and collapse the systems integration lifecycle.
• Relational databases are brittle. Changes in source data — like updating your product list in your enterprise planning system — can break the whole schema, forcing IT to spend days or weeks fixing things. Instead, Einstein Analytics is an organic, flexible system that’s 100% adaptable to change or varied data types.
• Relational databases can’t ingest unstructured or semistructured data. Legacy business intelligence and relational databases can only ingest specific types of data, and can only scale to structured datasets. They can’t ingest or combine semistructured data. Instead, Einstein Analytics can easily handle semistructured data because it works like a search engine, not a spreadsheet. Data is constantly changing, and is shaped differently today than it was 10 years ago. Einstein is designed to adapt to all of these changes, and more.
• Relational databases limit exploration; you can’t get to individual records. Databases use preaggregation and precomputation, which limits search flexibility. Legacy systems were optimised for performance and storage costs, making aggregation a necessary evil for queries. Instead, Einstein Analytics uses a key-value store and inverted index that allows slicing and dicing down to individual records, while making it easy to explore hundreds of millions of rows.

Legacy analytics solutions were never equipped to deliver self-service. Those technologies were built on the premise that all data mining would be done by analysts, who would email or share information with business users. These systems are inherently slow and inflexible, and it’s impossible to force them to move at consumer speed. But Einstein Analytics completely transforms business intelligence by moving from a schema-based design to a search-based design — finally putting analytics in the hands of employees, no matter where they’re working, and without the need for IT or analysts.

All you need to do is get your data into Einstein Analytics. Once it’s in the system, anyone with the right permissions can begin slicing and dicing data, and building dashboards.

Einstein Analytics is as close to plug-and-play as any analytics solution on the market. There are two ways to load Salesforce data: You can write the data flow yourself, or use a simple visual wizard to create your initial datasets. Many of our customers set up their initial Salesforce datasets within a few minutes or hours.

Getting third-party data into Einstein Analytics is relatively easy thanks to our integration partners. Depending on the volume of the data, this can take a few hours.

Most of your setup time will be spent identifying use cases and thinking strategically about which datasets make sense and what dashboards need to be built.

Nope. Unlike legacy business intelligence, Einstein Analytics is designed for every single person in your organisation.

Typical analytics solutions are difficult to use and require expertise. Even simple questions are sent into an overburdened service bureau, causing a backlog. This kind of system makes it difficult for analysts to deliver timely insights that drive strategic business decisions.

But Einstein Analytics is different. It’s designed to be used like a search engine, and enables you to explore and share data from every angle, on the fly. You no longer have to log tickets to ask a simple question — now you can get insight on your own.

Absolutely. One of the key features of Einstein Analytics products is dashboard creation and editing capabilities, so you can build them out as you like.

We don’t believe in discriminating against data sources. Einstein Analytics is open to any data, including structured CRM data in Salesforce, financial data in SAP, or inventory data in Oracle. And Einstein Analytics works with the overwhelming amount of new data being created all the time, including semistructured data from machines, sensors, mobile apps, and websites. We manage the data in Salesforce CRM apps, AppExchange apps, and Force.com custom apps directly. For other data sources, you can use any popular ETL tool to move data to Einstein Analytics, or leverage its public API to load data.

All of the data you have in Salesforce is available to you in Einstein Analytics. If you want to bring data directly into Einstein Analytics from another system, you need to upgrade to the Einstein Analytics license.

At Salesforce, trust is at the core of everything we do. Over 150,000 companies trust Salesforce to keep their cloud data safe. Our multilayered approach to security protects the integrity of your information — and our applications are always improving. Individual users are restricted by authentication, session limits, and audits that provide control and visibility. Organisations receive a unique identifier that makes data inaccessible to anyone outside the company.

Learn more about all the ways Salesforce keeps your data secure at trust.salesforce.com.