Ok, you want business intelligence but you don't have the resources (people, money) to build out a data warehouse, implement applications and then manage all of it going forward. A scary proposition at best and more than likely the reason many mid market companies are still lost in Excel hell.

LucidEra has launched a hosted business intelligence solution that does many of the chores for you. The company is headed up by Ken Rudin former VP and General Manager of Siebel CRM OnDemand at Siebel Systems. The solution is fully featured and includes Pre-built connectors to common data sources. Data extraction, transformation, and loading technology that transfers source data into the LucidEra database. A data cleansing service that deduplicates, merges, and matches data from multiple sources. The database is optimized for query and reporting and houses the user's combined data. An OLAP server delivers multidimensional views of the data for analysis. The user interface allows the creation of the business reports that the user will access.

The interesting thing about this announcement is where it impacts the market. LucidEra is providing a solution much like Salesforce.com. When many companies couldn't justify the cost of an enterprise CRM system they found a home in on demand hosted solutions and I think the same can happen in the business intelligence space. So the question is....is LucidEra salesforce.com for business intelligence? I've known Ken for a long time and if his past success is an indicator of future results this technology probably is.

A podcast is available if your interested in more information.

Technorati tags: business intelligence, LucidEra, Ken Rudin, salesforce.com