Last year while attending DreamForce, Salesforce’s annual extravaganza (disclosure, like other analysts, Salesforce supports my travel and expenses to attend the event each year), I was one of a group of analysts and journalists that got to grill CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff on any questions we had. My questions centered around the glaring (at least in my mind) fact that Salesforce doesn’t have a compelling analytics offering as part of its platform. Given that it’s competition, from Oracle ORCL +0.44% to SAP, is talking all about big data analytics as an enabler of the organization of the future, it seemed strange to me that Salesforce should be lacking in this area. Benioff did a good job, as only he can, of changing the topic and making everything sound rosy.