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LucidEra Launches Into SaaS BI Market
by Madan Sheina
Silicon Valley startup LucidEra Inc hopes to shake-up the pricy business intelligence market with a more affordable software-as-a-service offering aimed at mid-sized firms.
Founded in 2005, and cut from the same cloth as SaaS pioneers like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, LucidEra is now offering small and medium sized customers a fully hosted BI platform that provides query and reporting, OLAP analysis, and data integration (ETL and cleansing) functionality.
LucidEra said that all the BI components are built from scratch using home-grown technologies and are tightly integrated.
LucidEra said its first commercial SaaS offering is the result of one a half years of development. The product has been in beta since December.
To coincide with the release, LucidEra has also developed a "forecast-to-billing" analytic application aimed at finance and sales managers that runs on top of the core BI platform. The company said the application, which analyzes sales leads to customer billing cycles, is the first of many to come and is curently working with domain expert partners and systems integrators to roll out more applications later this year.
The company is also planning to release tools and SDKs later this year that allow partners to create and sell their own SaaS offerings.
While the richness and depth of LucidEra's core BI functionality won't win too many accolades, it is the ease of implementation and configuration and low cost of deployment, courtesy of a multi-tenant hosted model, that is expected to draw attention many SMB firms with shallow IT budgets and in-house resources.
LucidEra hosts customer applications and information at data centers located in Santa Clara and San Jose through a partnership with Equinix Inc.
Pricing for LucidEra's SaaS offering starts at around $3,000 per customer per month and includes support for 100 user seats, pre-built data connectors for up to three data sources and the forecast-to-billing application thrown in for free.
"We believe we've launched the first compete and affordable BI solution targeted at the SMB market," said Ken Rudin, founder and CEO of the San Mateo, California-based company.
"We've focused on making it simple to set-up, use and buy. That's completely opposite to most BI software solutions out there today that are complex, time consuming to set up, and often require specialized skills."
"We've basically taken a historically complex stack of BI technology and implemented it in on our own data center as a multi-tenant model."
LucidEra is targeting the BI mid-market for a good reason -- because it is thought to be grossly underserved right now and it is a sector where there is pressing need.
"If you look at how most SMBs are deploying BI today, most are in Excel hell. They're basically exporting their application to Excel and trying to match it up manually," Rudin points out.
However LucidEra isn't alone in targeting this space. Larger BI vendors like Business Objects, Cognos, and SAS Institute are also angling for a slice of this market, as are new SaaS startups like Oco, SeaTab, Sharp Analytics and Host Analytics .
"Clearly lot of people are targeting mid-market now. But you have to ask with what," Rudin said.
"It's difficult for an enterprise software company to move to an on-demand model overnight. Companies like Business Objects have attempted to do so by taking their enterprise products and basically re-packaging them as SaaS."
"They've broken the laws of physics to create new SaaS products and set up SaaS divisions in two weeks. But if you look closely they're just given their products a new name and pricing. Under the covers I'd argue that they're still as complex to use and manage."
Rudin said that LucidEra is also fundamentally different from other SaaS BI startups, which he said "are really consulting companies that start with a template and build out a custom BI stack for customers."
"The only difference between them and traditional BI companies is that they host it for you. But again, it's not necessarily easier to set-up or use."
Rudin also said that cost is also another differentiating factor: "Most of the early BI SaaS vendors only have a modest base of customers even though they've been around for years. Why? Because each one is a custom job and priced like an enterprise software deal."
"They'll typically charge you an initial outlay of $250,000 upwards just for set-up and configuration. We charge zero."
Rudin did not disclose how many customers have signed up for LucidEra as commercial customers. But he is confident of covert "dozens" of beta customers in the next few weeks.
(This article was originally published on Computer Business Review Online )
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