If rumors are true, it is sad to see pioneering BI on Demand provider LucidEra shutting down their service, however in attempt to recognize their value to the ongoing development of BI on Demand, let’s look at what we can learn from their demise.
LucidEra has been a strong evangelist for why, who and where BI on demand had a valuable role to play:
Why – on-demand can be a faster, lower cost, and more effective option
Who – especially small and mid-size, having a solution that can be rapidly deployed on a user by user basis may be the only affordable, and technologically viable choice.
Where – LucidEra also understood the significant value BI contributes at the front lines, such as the sales team and support centers.
Like any pioneer, the disadvantages are that the market has insufficient experience to determine what they want, what they need and how they want it delivered. In particular, BI customers want:
Fully featured BI – not simplified applications. Many early BI on Demand offerings were constrained by a standardized data model approach and standardized reports. This meant customers had to adapt their business problem to the LucidEra solution, rather than the ideal of the solution fitting their particular business needs.
Ability to Integrate Multiple Data Sources – To simplify deployments and deliver quickly, LucidEra started off focusing on Salesforce.com data only. However, many customers wanted to combine salesforce.com data with information from other systems, such as marketing, finance, and operational systems.
Power of true BI – a system is powerful enough to answer spontaneous business questions or identify and address unusual trends as they arise
Scalability – a system that will grow with them as their needs grow.
Did LucidEra make the mistake of assuming that customers would be willing to sacrifice power and flexibility for speed and low cost? If so, they are not alone, as many onDemand applications could be said to fall into this category.
In spite of the demise of LucidEra, this does not signal the downfall of BI on Demand applications. It merely serves to indicate as a painful way for one vendor to learn what the customer wants or needs before they build a service to meet that need. There are other BI on Demand vendors out there doing just that, having learnt from the experience of early BI pioneers and early BI adopters.
Just downloaded a very good whitepaper from Quantivo that provides an overview of how we can dig deeper below our normal web analytics to gain more insight into customer behaviour. Those of you who know me know how much a fan of cloud computing and business intelligence I am, and Quantivo has developed a great cloud SaaS application to enable all businesses to gain access to this valuable insight. I know this sounds like an ad [no, I am not getting paid to say this] – but I am just such a fan of making BI available for everyone.
Identify specific behaviour after:
Purchasing a product
Viewing a page or ad
Interacting with online content
Watching an online video
This helps you categorise each visitor as either “actively researching information, ready to purchase, or simply looking”
Take a quick look at this short video [4 mins]
The application also has an affinity database which provides relationship insight from relevant behavioral patterns to help you identify that big grey hole – the one where you don’t know what you don’t know!
Whether it is buzz, rants and raves, voice volume, sentiments or trends. When one delves into social media, there is the danger you may get lost and never find your way back out.
There are those who claim that influence cannot be measured, however much of ‘influence’ measurement depends upon the outcome the originator desires. If it is to create awareness or get market feedback, then a great toolset for providing that data is web based service application ScoutLabs.
Whilst I could find little evidence that SocialLabs provide real ‘analytics’ as claimed, they have come up with a great way for businesses to cut through the maze and locate the trails of impact that influence initiates.
Possibly a little pricey for small businesses – the lowest plan at $US99 a month to follow 5 search streams will possibly not be sufficient for most – yet the next plan, the Pro plan at $249 a month with 26 concurrent searches is a bit more than many SME’s can support. I would have liked to see something a bit more in between – say 12 searches for $125 a month. This would give more scope than 5 searches and remain more affordable.
But for corporates who pay more than this each month on getting market feedback via surveys and focus groups, SocialLabs offers a great service. Two plan features I do like is the unlimited user per workspace and the customisable template allowing agencies to offer clients access to their portal. Not sure how this works around restricting client views to certain search streams – but worth checking out.
And my condolensces on the passing of loved ScoutLabs team member Matt Ericson at such a young age.
