Business intelligence on-demand: Lucid analytics for a new era?

Business intelligence and analytics have been overlooked by the software as a service revolution to date. Enter LucidEra - aiming to be to business intelligence what Salesforce.com is to CRM.

By Stuart Lauchlan, news and analysis editor

In the software as a service (SaaS) revolution, areas such as CRM, salesforce automation, human resources and accounting have all come to the fore. To date, however, business intelligence and analytics have been largely conspicuous by their absence – with some heavy-hitters in the sector seemingly not interested.

That leaves an opportunity for a new generation of vendor, such as LucidEra, whose offering is currently focused on analytics of CRM and ERP data. However, the analytics applications are not special-purpose built, rather LucidEra has developed a generic BI platform, upon which it builds vertical solutions.

"Our ultimate goal is to be to BI what Salesforce.com is to CRM and all kinds of transaction applications,” says Ken Rudin, CEO of LucidEra and a veteran of firms such as Siebel and Salesforce.com itself. "A lot of the reason that many customers historically haven't been able to fully harness the capabilities of their BI solution is because traditional BI solutions have been very complicated to deploy and maintain, and very difficult to use. BI stands for 'bloated integration'.

“We are pre-built on-demand analytics as a service,” explains Rudin. “We've put a lot of effort into taking something expensive and difficult and making it simple. You used to have to go and buy software from Business Objects or Cognos, now you can buy the same thing as a service. The focus for us is simplicity. We want to offer people analytics that are simple to set up and use."

LucidEra is built on a Salesforce.com platform and is clearly very close to the SaaS CRM market leader. But the relationship need not be exclusive, says Rudin. “There are other people out there who can provide systems, like Microsoft,” he says. “That's at the CRM side of the world. Then there's the idea of getting deeper into the Oracle Financials side of the world.”

Dinosaurs and meteors

LucidEra would at first appear to be very dependent on Salesforce.com making its AppExchange marketplace for applications a success, but Rudin doesn't agree. “It's not so much about them making AppExchange a success,” he insists. “All we need is for Salesforce.com to be a success. For us, AppExchange is a great marketing vehicle for us to use and for people to find out about us.”

But Rudin is keen to emphasise that LucidEra will remain on-demand and not attempt on-premise versions. He had experience of the mixed model in his days at Siebel. “We tried that and we did nothing – that was a very painful experience,” he recalls. “To try to do on-premises and on-demand is very difficult. You end up with an internal battle because they are two very different business models.”

So it's music to his ears when he hears of the CEOs of traditional BI and analytics firms dismissing SaaS as just another deliver method. “There's consolidation going on in the market, but that's the dinosaurs buying other dinosaurs,” reckons Rudin. “What they don't realise is that there's a great big meteor heading towards them. When you hear people like Jim Goodnight at SAS dismissing the SaaS model, you just need to look at the companies that his firm is selling to and look at the ones that he can't sell to!

“If you do what SAS does on-premise, then you have built something as complicated as a nuclear reactor in your data centre. If you have enough money and enough skills then you can do it, if you can withstand the pain. But if you look at the mid-market, they can't do that. We have the same model as Salesforce.com from that point of view. We started in the mid-market because there's no viable opposition. There's no way a mid-market firm could afford to buy Jim Goodnight's software. In the mid-market, no-one is taught how to analyse their own business or or how to analyse their sales pipeline. That's where we come in with the whole concept of delivering this as a service.”

The latest offering from the firm is LucidEra Lead Insight, an analytic application that aims to align marketing programmes with sales success. The applications boasts more than 65 pre-built metrics focused on the "quality of marketing leads and how effectively they are converting to opportunities and ultimately to closed business." In other words, it optimises sales process—from the time a lead comes into the CRM system, to the time a customer is billed.

Rudin argues that for many companies the front-end of the sales funnel is often more like a “sales sieve” as marketing dollars are wasted on lead generation activities that don’t have a direct correlation to closed business while previously, companies had to implement complex on-premise reporting and analysis solutions to get the insight required to align sales and marketing managers.

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