LucidEra+Salesforce: Why we need lot less of Accenture & likes

By Vivek | June 27th, 2007 at 10:22 am ET         

For the past 10-15 years, Accenture, TCS, Infosys and likes followed a simple strategy - build behemoth body-shopping companies by offering 10 developers in India as compared to 1 in US for 20% of the cost. Great idea that has worked really well till now, but won’t be like that forever. While dealing with the pains of managing development efforts of 10X times more people and most of who are just at the first stage of their careers, companies in US are beginning to realize that most basic of the development activities that previously used to take 1-2 days now take 1-2 months. Companies who see this impact on their project timelines and move onto newer technologies are definitely going to the lead the way as compared to the ones whose primary concern has been to keep the cost down.

Salesforce and now LucidEra are bringing together all the talent in Silicon Valley to make sure that the companies who realize this fact and need the speed to charge ahead, have the right tools to do so. To fulfil that need, LucidEra will be announcing it’s partnership with Salesforce today that will enable finance and sales executives at companies using Salesforce?s on-demand platform and applications have access to a complete, on-demand reporting and analysis solution. And all this without the need for any complex setup or need for consulting services for can cost companies thousands of dollars for most minor of feature additions or support requests.

As part of the launch, LucidEra Forecast-to-Billing solution will combine sales and marketing data from Salesforce with financial data from accounting applications, and with data from excel and the Web to give companies visibility into what happens from the time a sales opportunity is created, to the time the customer invoiced. All in all, businesses users will now have access to an analytic solution that can zoom right into their sales and finance data via the drag and drop interface offered by LucidEra.

Now, do you see the need for bringing in any outsourcing partners anywhere in the data collection and reporting cycle? All your transactional data, ie CRM and data from other AppExchange apps, gets stored at Salesforce and when it is time for your run reports on the aggregate, LucidEra completes the job to perfection. In fact no need to even license Informatica On-Demand to get your data moved behind the firewall and than run analytics.

Thinking about this partnership and general trend in Enterprise software space, what I can confidently say is - thank you outsourcing partners and thank you professional services people, but the future doesn’t need you as much anymore.

LucidEra @ StartupSquad.com:
LucidEra- Looking ahead
LucidEra launches; Enterprise BI goes On-Demand
LucidEra set to rock Business Intelligence market
8 startups to watch-out for in 2007
LucidEra to launch On-Demand Analytics

Links:
LucidEra @ AppExchange