Over the last few months a small company called LucidEra has managed to capture the imagination of the business intelligence (BI) market. Built from the ground up to be 100% on demand, they have done a great job of promoting the benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) analytics to the traditionally data warehousing-centric, IT-oriented BI community. The last paragraph of this article is a great example of their positive media coverage and summarizes the on-demand opportunity for the BI market:

Wayne Eckerson, TDWI research director, says SaaS providers such as LucidEra are part of a new wave. "On-demand computing is the future of software, and the future of BI, at least for the small-medium size business market, if not for a majority of standard enterprise reporting applications," Eckerson comments. "LucidEra is one of the first BI on-demand services to hit the market, but it won't be the last. The simplicity, ease of use, and low cost make this approach a no-brainer for many applications."

LucidEra's Forecast-to-Billing Analysis application is now certified and available on the AppExchange for Salesforce customers. Designed to meet the reporting needs of sales managers, sales operations, and the finance department, the application combines (and cleanses) data from Salesforce and financial systems (Oracle and others) and presents the user with a consolidated, ad hoc query and analysis interface.

At this point, there are no reviews posted on the LucidEra AppExchange listing, but initial feedback has been positive. This article provides an overview of a LucidEra customer analyzing sales data from Salesforce and accounting data from Peachtree. Okay, the horse and buggy analogy was a bit harsh, but it is clear that LucidEra can be used to complement and extend what's possible natively with Salesforce reports and dashboards. While I'd like to see deeper front-end integration between LucidEra and Salesforce as a composite application, I commend them for managing to simplify the back-end set up and integration as well as the front-end BI user experience. A lot has been written about data warehousing costs and failures over the years. Could LucidEra become the poster child for what is now possible for analytic applications thanks to the on-demand model, multitenancy, and of course the power of the Salesforce platform? I encourage you to check out their Forecast-to-Billing Analysis application and share your feedback.

...oh, and did I mention that they got a nice mention today in this Wall Street Journal article. Not bad!