Salesforce.com Inc. is entering a new business, data analytics and business intelligence, seeking to maintain growth and persuade customers to pour more of their information into its data centers. The company announced Wave, a cloud-based information analytics system, at its Dreamforce conference today in San Francisco, as it branches out from customer-relationship management software. The service lets companies link data from different business departments, like sales, operations or management, into Salesforce’s system, then lets them analyze it visually on mobile devices and computers via the Internet. Salesforce is aiming to parlay its lead in customer relationship management into a position in the bigger data-analytics market, which IDC projects will grow at an average 9.4 percent a year through 2018. With Wave, companies can spot links between business units, like the relationship between the number of times salespeople have had a successful call with a customer and the failure rates gathered by sensors on the equipment sold to that client. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-12/salesforc...