Founder Ken Rudin and CEO Rob Reid are both CRM industry veterans with combined Oracle, Siebel, Upshot and salesforce.com senior management experience. So when they developed the SaaS business intelligence product they provide, needless to say, CRM was never far from their minds. That’s why, if you see what they provide, they give you lead, pipeline and order insight - all CRM related analytics and have three versions - one of which is devoted to salesforce.com and the other to Oracle Order Management - which of course is right at the heart of many CRM applications functionality. The other version, if you happened to wonder, is “Enterprise” which includes ERP and Excel spreadsheet data with the CRM data. So, the CRM pedigree here is strong. Their outlook is to provide considerably less expensive BI services to small and medium companies. They understand that because they are competing with giants like Cognos (IBM), Hyperion (Oracle) and Business Objects (SAP), that they have to be “different” - in a nice way of course. That means not only providing a basic model that keeps it simple for the SMBs, but also providing some business leadership in the world of BI so that the SMBs can begin to understand the marketplace and the value of BI. In fact, Ken Rudin has his own forecast for the 2009 BI world here. What makes their model appealing is that they know their market, they focus on it, and they provide services of genuine value tailored to the market - which means basic services that are meaningful - not a lot of customization. But its what the SMB companies need. LucidEra provides it and in a time of transformation, getting what you need to either participate in that transformation or weather it, is comforting. Watch these guys.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
