First of all, I haven't spoken to Ken Rudin CEO or Darren Cunningham VP Marketing yet (and I won't unless and until they decide to discuss it with me), so I can't offer a description of the events that lead to the closure LucidEra. There are some things I do know, though.

First, Ken and Darren are extremely competent and experienced software people. I've known both of them for years and have worked with them. Whatever happened, you can be sure it wasn't a result of poor management. In fact, knowing Ken the way I do, I'm quite sure he was a good steward of his investors' money and didn't buy a $47 million jet to complement his two yachts the way some other BI company CEO recently did.

However, unless I'm mistaken, both of them have deep resumes, but almost if not entirely in the enterprise software business working for companies like Business Objects, Siebel, Salesforce.com and Oracle. It was a bold, and perhaps misguided attempt to aim a startup at the notoriously hard to identify SMB (small-medium business) segment, especially when the principals lacked the deep connections to partners and VARs needed to reach this market. Again, I'm speculating, but this seems to me to be sort of obvious. Selling into the SMB market requires a completely different message, vocabulary and approaches. In my consulting practice with software companies, this is a common problem that I also hasten to point out. Even if you know THEM (the SMB's) the real question is, do they know you, and what are you willing to spend to get hooked up with them?

I also wonder if it was too risky to come out with a product that was so narrow? LucidEra was not a BI product, it was a BI application. When you combine the tough economic hurdle they ran into at their most vulnerable time, combined with an application designed to address one small part of a firm's application portfolio and a presumably tough learning curve in the SMB market, the risk (in retrospect) looks too great to bear.

I liked the LucidEra product. My wife was about to add it on to her Salesforce.com system for her business. Without any prodding from me, she found the easy start-up, simplified licensing and almost transparent integration with Salesforce.com just what the doctor ordered. I suspect someone will pick it up and it will live on.