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Views on the News: More Reaction to LucidEra’s Demise

June 24, 2009

The end of LucidEra clearly is a milestone in the overlapping business intelligence and software-as-a-service sectors. Following is the analysis of five bloggers on the news:



From myDIALS’ CEO Wayne Morris:

What does the demise of LucidEra really mean?

It was with mixed emotions that I read about LucidEra shutting down.  If you are not familiar with LucidEra, they are a SaaS BI company heavily focused on delivering sales analytics and are closely aligned with salesforce.com.  The mixture of emotions was because there is overlap between what myDIALS offers and what LucidEra has offered.  While one less competitor is good, at the same time knowing how hard it is to create a new company, I feel somewhat sad that they are closing their doors and it also seems appropriate to examine why that might be.

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From Dave Kellogg at Mark Logic CEO Blog:

Au Revoir LucidEra

I’ve always thought BI was a particularly difficult category “to SaaS” for a number of reasons:

  • The dependency on external data. Operational apps (e.g., NetSuite, Salesforce) inherently have data associated with them, data that gets loaded initially when you configure the app, and data that gets supplemented every day when you use it. BI is a blank slate that requires data to be useful.
  • The variability of user requirements. There are only so many ways to call a lead, pay an invoice, or promote an employee (i.e., implement use-cases in transactional apps). In BI, just about any question you can imagine is fair game and different people think about things in different ways. This is one reason why BI has seemed to defy “applicationization,” despite repeated attempts from multiple vendors. While you certainly can package some common reports and dashboards, my guess is you’re grabbing only 20% of the requirements, not the 80% you grab when package up transactions.

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From Christina Torode at SearchCIO:

SaaS BI vendor LucidEra’s demise harkens to ASP downfalls

When my inbox began filling up with all the theories of why BI SaaS vendor LucidEra is expected to close down by month’s end, I couldn’t help thinking that the more things change (in name, at least), the more they stay the same.
LucidEra is in part a victim of a down economy, just as application service providers (ASPs) were in the late ’90s/early 2000s when the dot-com bust happened and VC funding started to dry up.

Like ASPs USinternetworking and Corio, LucidEra was one of the first to the SaaS BI parade. It had to lay new ground in many ways: The Web technologies that today’s SaaS vendors tap into weren’t around when LucidEra got started, so the company had a bigger learning curve and had to do lot of the development itself.

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From Roman Stanek’s Push-Button Thinking:

LucidEra: the People Express of On-Demand BI?

I am not happy to see LucidEra disappearing. It is not a good sign for the SaaS BI market in general and the startups in our space specifically. And I still believe Rob Ashe (IBM/Cognos) was wrong when he said that “BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS”.

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From Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise:

Is the LucidEra Over?

Chris Kanaracus of The Industry Standard reported yesterday that SaaS-base BI vendor LucidEra is set to shutter the business and put all assets up for sale. The story named only “a person familiar with the company’s situation” as the source. There’s no official word on the Web site and all my attempts to reach the company have failed thus far.

[Update: Darren Cunningham, LucidEra's VP of Marketing, responded to inquiries 6/23 at 3:40 pm ET with the following e-mail message:

All that I can say at this time is that our product and pipeline were both stronger than they'd ever been. Customer adoption was growing, which was reflected in the 20+ 5-star reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange since January. We got hit by just really, really bad timing to have to be raising our next round of funding in this economic climate.

Right now, various options are being looked at in the best interest of our creditors, customers, employees, and shareholders. There should be resolution for everyone involved soon so there is an orderly transition.]
Competitors including Birst and MyDials have used this news as an opportunity to launch PR campaigns picking over the carcass. It escapes me why some vendors and PR people think a dose of Schadenfreude is a good way to raise the stature and profile of your own company/client. Whether it’s a bankruptcy, poor quarterly earnings or other bad news, I seldom see how it says anything positive about (or should invite comment from) a competitor. Ford, in contrast, is riding a tide of favorable press and public sentiment these days not because it is out there saying “our competitors are bankrupt, here’s where they went wrong and here’s what we’re doing right.” Rather, Ford has focused solely on its own positive story in the midst of an otherwise unfavorable business climate.

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Posted by Carl · Filed Under Business Intelligence, Risk and Compliance, SaaS 

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