LucidEra BI SaaS

LucidEra Inc was founded in 2005, following the pathway of SaaS pioneers Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

LucidEra offers small and medium sized businesses [SMBs] a fully hosted BI platform that includes:

• Query and reporting
• OLAP analysis
• Data integration (ETL and cleansing) functionality.

Applications

LucidEra launched the first compete and affordable BI solution targeted at the SMB market.

The LucidEra BI components are built from scratch using home-grown technologies and are tightly integrated. They have also developed a "forecast-to-billing" analytic application aimed at finance and sales managers that runs on top of the core BI platform.

The application analyzes sales leads to customer billing cycles, and is the first of many to come.

Tools and SDKs allow partners to create and sell their own SaaS offerings.

The depth of LucidEra's core BI functionality is pretty standard fare, but the ease of implementation and configuration as well as the low cost of deployment using a multi-tenant hosted model, is attracting SMB firms with lower IT budgets and in-house resources.

LucidEra hosts customer applications and information at data centers located in Santa Clara and San Jose.

If you are not using metrics in sales and marketing you are wasting time and resources. Attempting to use CRM and MS Excel causes a lot of process issues and doesn't give you the security around data to ensure one version of the truth.

To get the analysis to run your business, you need an analytics program.

Lucid Era develops pre-built solutions for each area of the busines. It's a plug and play application that can work with onsite or onDemand solutions such as Salesforce CRM.

Cost

• Pricing of LucidEra's BI SaaS starts at around $3,000 per customer per month. This includes:
• Support for 100 user seats
• Pre-built data connectors for up to three data sources
• The forecast-to-billing application for free

The application is simple to set-up, use and buy. This aims to get SMBs away from typical inhouse BI deployes that involve basically exporting their application to Excel.

Product Features

The challenge for enterprise software companies to move to an on-demand model is not an overnight event.

Some companies such as Business Objects have attempted to do so by merely repackaging their enterprise BI products as BI SaaS. Beyond the new product name and more affordable pricing, the products are still as complex to use and manage.

Other early BI SaaS vendors were consulting companies that approached SMB BI with a simple template, and built up a custom BI stack for customers. They then host it for you. The cost ended up ike an enterprise software deal, reflecting the custom job. They typically charged an initial outlay of $250,000 upwards just for set-up and configuration

Fortunately there were companies such as LucidEra that approached the challenge from a fundamentally different perspective. LucidEra made no charge for set up and configuration.

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