Businesses large and small alike can find themselves swimming in data: data about their customers, data about their operations, data about their market, and so much more.  In the digital economy, with more software, more devices, more mobility and more connected things, we as individuals, as employees, and as consumers generate clouds of “digital dust,” and the task of making sense of data has catapulted to the top of the priority list for the most innovative companies.

As a salesforce.com customer, you have a couple of options to utilize tools that they provide to analyze your business data, both the data that is resident within your salesforce instance and even data that is stored in other applications or data stores.  These two solutions are:

• The Einstein family or analytics platforms for native salesforce data, such as Sales Cloud Analytics, Marketing Cloud Analytics and more;
• Einstein Discovery, the newest entry in the salesforce solution set that performs predictive analytics (more on that in a minute) on any data source, including data sources from outside of salesforce. 

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