SaaS Week

San Mateo, Calif.-based LucidEra is a company that offers business analytics solutions via an on-demand platform. Last week, LucidEra issued a press release about a new tool for Oracle Order Management users. Ken Rudin, CEO of LucidEra, shared some thoughts with SaaS Week about the new releases and the future of ERP as a service.

What are the key improvements in LucidEra's winter releases?
      
Rudin: One is enhancements to LucidEra Enterprise and LucidEra for Salesforce.com include the ability to schedule the delivery of dynamic reports via email, greater configuration for our platform’s ability to take snapshots of opportunities as they move through your pipeline,  and tighter integration with Salesforce.com. We’ve also introduced a new Analytics Gallery designed to make it easy to access and share analytics best practices. The second is a new on-demand analytic application called LucidEra for Oracle Order Management. This is a path to SaaS for Oracle E-Business Suite customers. 

What was the market need behind the new on-demand solution that led to its conception/development?

Rudin: Business Intelligence has always been too complex, costly, and time consuming. The result is that only companies with large IT organizations and consulting dollars could afford the investment. And once they manage to implement the disparate hardware and software, they lack the expertise to actually use these complicated tools…not to mention the upgrade process every couple of years. LucidEra is delivering simple to set up, simple to use, and simple to buy business analytics as an on-demand service. We’re delivering prebuilt analytic applications that address specific business challenges, such as pipeline management, and our customers are achieving new levels of visibility thanks to the ability to get answers from their transactional data, not just static reports and not by building an on-premise data warehouse.

Do you think the trend of moving ERP to SaaS is going to pick up the same steam as SaaS-based CRM?

Rudin: Yes. SaaS applications are becoming more aligned with business process. We’re pioneering the market shift to business analytics as a service which we think is happening at a faster pace than transactional ERP systems.

Any opinions on the rumor that's been circulating about Salesforce.com approaching Oracle about an acquisition (is it all hogwash and even if so, would it be a good move for either company)?

Rudin: These rumors circulate around our industry so often that it's impossible to tell what's real and what isn't.  But, I think it would be better for Salesforce.com to remain independent.  It's really hard to combine the on-demand model with the traditional enterprise software model.  The risk is that the clashing business models could be fatal for Salesforce.com.