LucidEra emerges from stealth mode
by Staff Writer
Californian startup LucidEra Inc is poised to step into the commercial market after announcing that customer testing of its new on-demand business intelligence system has finally begun.
LucidEra's hosted BI service offering is primarily aimed at resource-strapped mid-market firms that have typically been priced out of BI due to the complexity and expense of deployment.
"The huge amount of internal infrastructure that current reporting and analysis solutions require makes them infeasible for most mid-market companies," said CEO and co-founder Ken Rudin. "This situation isn't sustainable, and it's time to fix it."
Rudin outlined a development roadmap for a "complete" on demand BI service that combines and OLAP server, a query optimized database schema, pre-built reporting and analysis components, easy to set up connectors to data sources, pre-defined extract, transform and load routines, and built-in data cleansing services.
The company has already announced its first pre-built reporting and analysis offering, which is currently in customer beta testing. Forecast-to-Billing analyzes sales lead to customer billing cycles and is aimed at finance, sales and sales operations managers.
But LucidEra's core BI functionality won't win that many accolades for richness and depth right now. It is the ease of implementation and configuration that is the real eye catcher for mid-market customers.
The key to LucidEra's on-demand approach is that it eliminates the technology deployment and maintenance burden and dramatically speeds up set-up time. The hosted system can also be easily configured via a point and click interface instead of requiring database engineers and programmers.
Hosted deployment of the system is through a multi-tenant approach, which LucidEra claims achieves economies of scale similar to those by mature on-demand application providers like Salesforce.com or NetSuite.
LucidEra isn't the only on demand (also called software as a service) BI game in town. In fact the company is entering an increasingly competitive market. Companies like Oco Software, Host Analytics , Seatab and Sharp Analytics already provide on demand BI and analytic offerings.
And established BI and data warehousing software makers like Business Objects, SAS Institute and Informatica are also dabbling in the SaaS delivery model.
Rudin said the completeness of LucidEra's BI offering will differentiates it from other on-demand plays.
"Unlike solutions that host only one of the many components needed for BI, for example only reports or data extraction technology), or access data in only one application, LucidEra integrates and pre-packages all the components."
LucidEra was founded in 2005 by BI industry veterans working at Siebel Analytics and Business Objects. Rudin was previously vice president and general manager of Siebel Systems' CRM On Demand division. The company is headquartered in San Mateo.
LucidEra's on demand BI system is expected to make its full commercial debut in the first quarter of 2007. The company has not yet nailed down specific pricing, but the service is expected to start at a few thousands dollars per month.
(This article was originally published on Computer Business Review Online )
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