http://www.lucidera.com/blog Thoughts about Business Analytics as an On-Demand Service Fri, 16 May 2008 20:20:54 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/16/keep-it-simple-highlights-of-the-week/ 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: | View | Upload your own http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/15/the-w5-of-sales-analytics/ 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/14/bi-as-a-service-is-not-business-intelligence/ 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/14/analytics-semantics/ 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/13/the-science-of-selling/ 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/09/ibm-is-completely-missing-the-boat-on-business-analysis-as-a-service/ 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/09/dilbert-deals-with-the-numbers/ 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/08/the-truthiness-of-number-spinning/ 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 ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/07/ashe-on-saas/ 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, ... http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/07/great-reviews-for-lucidera-on-the-appexchange/