9 companies that are in big trouble if Salesforce Analytics is real

Enterprise software giant Salesforce.com has made its offerings into a sort of platform that other software companies can build on. And if Salesforce is indeed about to launch a business-analytics tool, the move could jeopardize a whole bunch of startups and even publicly traded companies that sit in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Just look at the Salesforce AppExchange, which is the name of the app store Salesforce has built over the past few years. You could put together a list of companies that partner with Salesforce and could now be in the crosshairs because of the news.

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And that’s exactly what we’ve done. Read on to get a sense of the major impact Salesforce is about to make.

• BIME Analytics. Based in France, BIME reeled in $4 million last year and aims to put together “stunning dashboards” using data from on-premises software sources as well as online sources like Salesforce sales software and Google Analytics. The question is whether BIME will want to raise lots more money. Or maybe it will change things up and go down a different path if Salesforce moves into cloud business-intelligence in a big way.
• Birst. The business-intelligence startup does have generous funding to work off and a solid new chief executive. But the value of Birst’s mostly positive reviews in the AppExchange could be at risk of dropping if Salesforce starts letting customers push sales data in and make charts and dashboards with data from Salesforce and potentially other sources.
• C9. It claims to “deliver a precision forecast powered by data science” — which is handy for managers. But Salesforce Analytics Cloud might well assemble sleek visualizations and dashboards using Salesforce data, as C9 does. This means trouble could lie ahead for C9, which announced a $12 million round last year.
• DataHero. These guys specialize in dead-simple chart-making tools, with just a few integrations, including the new addition of Salesforce’s Pardot marketing-automation service. The startup raised $3.15 million late last year and recently moved to a freemium business model.
• Fliptop. It provides predictive lead scoring, which can be quite useful to help salespeople focus on the best prospects, but it also creates dashboards, which a Salesforce Analytics Cloud might be capable of producing as well.
• Futurelytics. This two-year-old startup from the Czech Republic strives to stand out with the “retention automation platform” tagline. Last year it raised $800,000.
• GoodData. The venture-backed startup goes out of its way to say that customers can “get up and running in days.” That’s nice, but companies that already pay for Salesforce’ sales software might find it easy and only natural to switch on Salesforce-brand business intelligence, rather than going to an external partner like GoodData.
• InsightSquared. It’s striven to take on Microsoft Excel. It took on $8 million last year. And given that it claims to be “the #1 Salesforce Analytics app for data-driven business executives and their teams,” it could be in for rough times.
• SalesPredict. This startup focuses on showing companies which of their customers might churn and which might be on the brink of buying. It announced $4.1 million in funding. But that might be enough to protect its predictive-analytics capabilities from being affected by a Salesforce analytics play.

Startups on this list might want to ask their contacts at Salesforce what the Analytics Cloud is all about, so they can figure out what to do next.

And we, too, would like to learn more about the service. Salesforce declined to comment. “Stay tuned for Dreamforce,” a company spokeswoman told VentureBeat.