Hitting a Nerve?

Since our launch earlier this month, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of coverage we’ve been getting in the press and in the blogosphere, and by the amount of emails I’m getting. I’ve always thought that what we’re doing is pretty exciting, but you never quite know what the market will think until you put something out there and let people comment on it. So, I’m very happy (and very relieved) that the response has been very, very positive.

Actually, I’m overwhelmed by the response. It’s hard to know exactly what’s fueling the response, but there seems to be two common threads in what I’m hearing from people. First, there’s the SaaS perspective. The SaaS model for transactional applications (like CRM, ERP, and HR) has already hit the tipping point. It has become an accepted approach for deploying operational systems, and customer satisfaction with SaaS solutions is very high. It’s a rapidly growing industry, and it has already had a strong positive impact on the transactional applications market by bringing innovation back into the market.

Based on the recent responses I’ve seen, people believe that the SaaS model for reporting and analysis / Business Intelligence solutions will be equally as successful, and that it represents the next logical step for SaaS. That is, first you use SaaS operational systems to collect the data. Next, you use SaaS Business Intelligence solutions to analyze the data you’ve collected.

The second thread comes from the Business Intelligence perspective. There is a strong emotional component to these responses. I think we’ve somehow hit a nerve with people based on our focus on simplicity, and people are expressing their frustration with the status quo. People have been laboring with complexity in their BI solutions for too long, when they really just want something that gets the job done with no headaches. Other people are responding to how BI has been focused on the elite companies who have the resources and the skills to manage a BI implementation, leaving the majority of the world’s workforce without any insight into the key drivers affecting their on-the-job performance. Focusing on bringing a simple solution to employees in non-elite companies is exciting for a lot of people.

And, there’s even some controversy that’s been stirred up. There are of course some skeptics who believe that the traditional approach is the superior approach, and that SaaS BI won’t amount to much. This reminds me of my early days at salesforce.com (the company had fewer than 20 employees when I joined). There were tons of predictions that salesforce.com would never be taken seriously, that the business model didn’t make sense, that the product was too limited, that Siebel was unstoppable, etc. But, clearly, salesforce.com has had an impact in the market that far exceeds the size of the company.

Time will tell what type of impact LucidEra will have on the reporting and analysis / Business Intelligence market. But the salesforce.com precedent is certainly an inspiration for us, and for many other SaaS companies.

posted by Ken Rudin at 10:33 pm

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Darren Cunningham

Posted on 23rd March, 2007

Great post Ken. Best of luck to you and your team and congratulations on a successful launch. Now the fun begins! We’re looking forward to seeing LucidEra on the salesforce.com AppExchange and hearing about fantastic customer success.

Dennis Howlett

Posted on 16th April, 2007

I only just found this via a blog talking about Web 2.0 Expo. This is fasinating stuff and I’m just sorry I missed your launch.

Can you pop some links into this post so I can get the context of what you’re saying plese? Thanks.