Salesforce appears to be prepping a cloud-based analytics service

Updated at 12:17 Pacific with a response from Salesforce.

Salesforce.com, already a big dealer of enterprise software, looks set to launch a whole new product line at its Dreamforce conference next month. The name: Analytics Cloud.

Here’s the evidence. Look at the the Oct. 15 column of the “draft agenda” Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff tweeted out this morning. The highest green box in that column says “Analytics Cloud Keynote.” Whoa.

Wells Fargo technology analyst Jason Maynard saw that.

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“We have long thought that the company would eventually be adding an Analytics Cloud, given some of the strategic acquisitions that they have made,” he wrote in a note this morning. “We are assuming that the analytics capabilities will feature more comprehensive reporting functionality with visual analytics, and drill down features. We think that this is based on the June 2013 acquisition of EdgeSpring. We believe that the relateIQ functionality will complement this nicely.”

Indeed, the service would make a big impact for Salesforce by expanding it beyond sales, service, marketing, and “communities” software. The addition “could represent a $500-million to a billion-dollar opportunity over the next three to four years,” Maynard wrote.

It’s a big deal for Salesforce to finally do more to analyze data, and likely the data already sitting in Salesforce software for tracking sales leads, help-desk requests, and marketing-automation tools. Think business intelligence, think business analytics, which lots of companies, big and small, can do for Salesforce data. Which could make the move a big deal for companies in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Salesforce declined to provide an official comment. But a spokeswoman did tell VentureBeat, “Stay tuned for Dreamforce.”

In case you want more proof of the new service, by the way, check out job posting for a chief operating officer of the Analytics Cloud. The posting, which went live last month, shows Salesforce is seeking someone who can “cultivate, lead and direct the Analytics Cloud strategic planning process aligned with overall Corporate strategic planning initiatives and other relevant orgs.” The person also will have to put in place a dashboard for keeping on top of the progress of the business plan and “assist in the enablement plan to support the Dreamforce launch and beyond.”

Aha! So Benioff’s tweet doesn’t seem so crazy after all.

Generally speaking Salesforce has been pushing out many more job descriptions relating to the Analytics Cloud effort, like this one for an analytics back-end engineer.

“We can’t say what the project is exactly, but since we’re Salesforce, the work is in exciting technologies like mobile, cloud, social, big data, and the new Salesforce1 platform,” the posting says.