LucidEra to launch On-Demand Analytics

By Vivek Puri | October 12th, 2006 at 02:37 pm ET         

Ever since the launch of Salesforce.com in 1999, opportunity has been there for a company to build and provide an On-Demand Business Intelligence platform. As in the CRM market, Small and Medium size businesses(SMB) need an low-cost, low/no-maintenance On-Demand BI platform. Till now most of them were forced to opt for commercial Business Intelligence products which are prohibitively expensive. Companies opting for an in-house analytics need to purchase COTS products like Informatica, Cognos, Business Objects, Trillium that have a combined price tag of $700k +. Besides the software companies also need to spend on development, maintenance of these analytic applications, which soon goes out of their budget. In most of the cases, SMBs end up using Excel/Access for business reporting.

LucidEra team has been smart enough to recognize the issues being faced by SMBs and have developed a complete stack of web-based On-Demand Business Intelligence product. Businesses can now pull their data into LucidEra system and instantly run their analytic reports at a fraction of price. LucidEra, a team of around 30 people is located in San Mateo, CA and is lead by Ken Rudin. LucidEra team includes people from major BI companies like Oracle, Siebel, Business Objects, Informatica, Salesforce.com, BEA, and Informix. LucidEra had raised $7 million in Series A round of funding from Matrix Partners and Benchmark Capital.

LucidEra provides a set of pre-built reports and dashboards to enable customers get a quick view of their business metrics. Customers can also create their own reports using a simple and easy to use web-based interface. As for sourcing of data, LucidEra can fetch data from Salesforce.com, Oracle ERP, Netsuite, spreadsheets, and from databases using JDBC connectors. Ken Rudin showed me the demo of LucidEra reporting module and i will say that it is one of the best reporting UI i have come across. Business managers can quickly slice, dice, drill their data, and instantly view reports using the ajax based interface to get better insights of their business. 

Since LucidEra is targeting SMBs, they have optimized their data to easily handle few giga bytes of data loads without any performance loss. Off course all the data will be sent and received over an encrypted network and companies will have the ability to export their data into excel format. LucidEra has built the product with Unicode support which will help in its expansion into international markets.

LucidEra will be launching the beta of its ambitious product in the 2nd week of November and i feel that lot of companies will be interested in what LucidEra has to offer. This launch will include the Forecast-to-Billing prebuilt application that will enable companies to have an “unified view of their customers as they go through the process from opportunity, to order, to cash collection”. Using Forecast-to-Billing app companies will be able to capture their sales, booking, billing, and backlog performance metrics all in one place.

Just like Salesforce.com, companies can use LucidEra on per month basis which will include standard tech support and gold level support being available for an extra charge. LucidEra’s pricing will be around $3K per month which will include the Forecast-to-Billing prebuilt analytic application, 5GB of storage, prebuilt connectors to common source systems which automatically extract the latest changes to customer data every day, and built-in capabilities to remove duplicate data and automatically match up things like customer names across your systems (even though the names may be spelled differently in different systems.)  Package will also include the first five users for free. LucidEra team will also offer trial accounts sometime in future. 

Personally i feel LucidEra has developed an extraordinary product which involves high level of technical complexity(ETL, BI, Data Cleansing) as well as business knowledge. Any competitor will have tough time catching up with LucidEra.

Links:
LucidEra

Tags: StartupSquad - Enterprise2.0 - OnDemand - Salesforce - BI - ETL