KEEP IT SIMPLE
Archive for September, 2007
Take the Spreadmart Survey
The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) and Rick Sherman from the Data Doghouse are running a survey for an upcoming best practices research report called, “Strategies for Managing Spreadmarts and Integrating with Microsoft Office.” You can take the survey here.
Being Contrary to the Contrarian
This month’s CFO Magazine has an article by John Edwards called “Software as a Serpent“, in which he mentions leading SaaS vendors (including LucidEra) and highlights what he considers to be issues with the SaaS model. Certainly there’s no perfect model for software (or anything else in business, for that matter) — everything has it’s […]
Is Excel the Problem or the Solution?
I thought the timing of the news about Excel flunking some math problems was rather ironic given some of Microsoft’s recent BI announcements. In fact, I think the news of the Excel bug may have received more attention than their déjà-vu PerformancePoint launch last week. Here’s some of the coverage:
Microsoft: Excel 2007 bug is skin […]
Everything is a Platform!
I’m a big Dilbert fan. I was sent this one a few times recently so in light of the force.com announcement I thought I’d post it here.
Pretty good, but my favorite is still this one on dashboards.
10 Reasons Salesforce.com Customers Need LucidEra Sales Analysis
Many salesforce.com customers at Dreamforce were interested in learning about the unique capabilities of LucidEra Sales Analysis that will help drive CRM success and make Salesforce more strategic to the business. Here is a summary:
LucidSnapshots: Understand your past, control your future
New versus existing customer analysis
Beginning of quarter analysis
Dynamic reporting and analysis across objects and matched accounts
Opportunity / product analysis
Territory performance analysis
Running sums […]
LucidEra in the Wall St. Journal
LucidEra was nicely featured in today’s Wall St. Journal in an article called Making Sense of it All, by Michael Totty. Rob Meinhardt, CEO of LucidEra customer KACE Networks Inc., wraps up the article with a fantastic quote:
“If you look at the historical cost and effort, [enterprise-class business intelligence] was too much for a company our […]
Platform is a Service Video
This 5 minute video by the marketing team at salesforce.com was very well done.
…and if you have a couple of hours on your hands you can always watch the Dreamforce keynote session. It’s both “amazing” and “phenomenal”.
Easier and Lower Cost Business Intelligence
I spoke to so many people at Dreamforce this week who:
Were struggling to bring together data in complex spreadsheets in order to analyze data from multiple systems (see this short presentation on Excel Hell as an example).
Believed that in order to get historical analysis of transactional data (even shapshots!) a costly and time-consuming data warehouse project was required.
Knew nothing about […]
Software Business 2007 and Sales 2.0
With Dreamforce ‘07 behind us, what’s next on your event calendar?
Here are a couple of up-coming conferences to consider:
1) Ken Rudin will be speaking on a topic near-and-dear to him at the Software Business 2007 Conference: The Threat from Within: How Cannibalization is Creating a Civil War within Large Enterprise Software Vendors. It’s on Oct 2nd […]
The Myth of Business Intelligence Standardization
Guy Weismantel has really stepped it up on the Performance Guys blog. His latest post is called, The Myth of BI Standardization. He makes the point that BI purchase decisions are typically “done at the individual or departmental level, and they’ll likely stay that way.” While Guy does tend to get a little Microsoft-centric in his claims, I […]
Ken Rudin is the CEO of LucidEra. He co-founded the on-demand business intelligence company in 2005. Ken is a veteran of the rapidly growing software as a service industry with over 7 years of experience as an executive with leading on-demand software vendors. These include roles at Salesforce.com, at Netsuite (as an advisor), and at Siebel's on-demand division.
Darren Cunningham is the Director of Product Marketing at LucidEra. Prior to joining LucidEra he was the Category Director for salesforce.com AppExchange Analytics and Data Management. Before joining the on-demand world, he spent over 7 years at Business Objects.
Nate Bride is a Senior Account Executive at LucidEra. Nate has over 14 years experience in building, training, and running sales teams. Most recently, Nate was the VP of Sales at Abso, a leading provider of talent management solutions. Prior to Abso, Nate ran Sales Effectiveness at Salesforce.com. Nate is married with two young daughters and lives one hour from Lake Tahoe.