Blog: Shawn Rogers

Main

July 11, 2007

I don't need reports. I need answers!

I have spent a lot of time in my blog talking about how important it is for companies to get business intelligence in the hands of the masses. BI for everybody just doesn't seem to have a downside, except the current cost of giving it to everybody. Like many people in the industry I have been waiting for someone to come along and really solve the problem. Several of the "big stack" players have made gestures, and Microsoft has announced a pricing model that will certainly get the attention of many companies looking to introduce business intelligence to their enterprise.

So, the question is who will win the race? I am not bold enough to declare a winner but I have to say the LucidEra might just be the horse to bet on. Their SaaS analytics model is interesting to say the least. They just announced a partnership with SalesForce.com that allows them to bring together the transactional data that comes from the SalesFroce systems with the their hosted analytics platform.

The platform offers a flexible interface that allows business users a way to take a report from the system and then do ad-hoc analysis against it without having to go back a create a new report. One of their clients had the following to say:

"Reports stop you from repeating your past mistakes. But the ability to analyze your data is what really helps you avoid making new mistakes."

The LucidEra solution seems best fit to SMB companies that have a highly distributed work force and don't want the hassle and cost of managing business intelligence in house. I like the sound of this approach, I'm familiar with the executive management at LucidEra and believe they can deliver, check them out if you need a new approach to business intelligence.

TAGS
Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence, Software as a service, LucidEra, SaaS

Posted by at 6:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)