KEEP IT SIMPLE
Archive for May, 2008
Keep it Simple Highlights of the Week
It’s been 100+ degrees this week in Silicon Valley, and the topic of business analytics as an on-demand service has been equally hot. Here are the highlights of the week from the LucidEra blog:
Ken Rudin kicked things off on a quiet Friday afternoon with a Cognos SaaS Smackdown
Milestone-Group outlined how sales is becoming more science […]
The W5 of Sales Analytics
Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak about LucidEra and the importance of sales analytics at the Telebusiness Alliance. You can read a brief overview of the day on Life in the Telebusiness Trenches Blog.
Here’s what we call the W5 of Sales Analytics:
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BI-as-a-Service is not Business Intelligence
Richard Hackathorn has written a couple of blog posts this week following LucidEra’s presentation to the Boulder BI Brain Trust. The first post, LucidEra Pioneering BI-as-a-Service, is a summary of his impressions of the meeting along with wisdom that comes from his over 30 years of experience in the IT industry:
“The best information only has value […]
Analytics Semantics
A few months ago I wrote a post called, “What is an analytic application?” It led to some interesting commentary, including this feedback from IDC’s Henry Morris:
“An analytic application must meet each of the following three conditions:
Process support. Packaged application software that structures and automates a group of tasks pertaining to the review and optimization […]
The Science of Selling
Join us tomorrow for an interactive webinar with our partner Milestone Group. The topic of the discussion is: The Science of Selling: Maximizing Sales Success with On-Demand Analytics.
Featured presenters will be Mark Zawacki, Managing Partner & Founder, Milestone Group and Ken Rudin, CEO and Co-Founder, LucidEra. Register to learn and discuss:
How to accelerate top line […]
IBM is Completely Missing the Boat on Business-Analysis-As-A-Service
As Darren Cunningham already mentioned, Rob Ashe (general manager of IBM’s business intelligence and performance management unit) commented that “BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS” in an interview. His explanation is:
“Every company is different because even if transaction systems are the same the decision making process is different. Unlike Netsuite or a CRM application […]
Dilbert Deals with the Numbers
Good stuff from Dilbert this week on the importance of basing business decisions on accurate information.
Here are the Keep it Simple highlights of the week:
5 Signs You Need a Better Approach to Sales Analytics (sorry about the snake swallowing the egg picture!)
SaaS and Business Intelligence are CIO Priorities (surprise, surprise…)
Great Reviews for LucidEra on the AppExchange (yes, […]
The Truthiness of Number Spinning
Last week I was chatting with a LucidEra customer who told me that her hunch that the top sales reps were closing the biggest deals turned out to be completely false once she dug into the data. As much as she tried to prove her hypothesis by “slicing and dicing” the data in different ways, the numbers just wouldn’t lie for […]
Ashe on SaaS
While SAP has been busy publishing integration roadmaps (and occasional apologies) for the company formerly known as Business Objects, the good folks at IBM have been fairly quiet about their plans for my Canadian friends at Cognos. It seems to be a foregone conclusion that Cognos will become just another piece of IBM’s Information On […]
Great Reviews for LucidEra on the AppExchange
LucidEra for Salesforce.com received a couple of great reviews on the AppExchange this week:
As always, we’d like to thank our customers for taking the time to share their feedback on the AppExchange. We’re extremely proud of these reviews and will continue to focus and deliver on on our company values of simplicity, adoption, analytic innovation, and success (SAAS).


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.