My friend Phil Wainwright’s latest blog post re: LucidEra’s new pre-sales program, Pipeline Healthcheck, confirms many of my initial observations when the company first introduced the program in October. Phil’s post includes a number of interesting stats which LucidEra’s founder, Ken Rudin, also shared with me at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event.

LucidEra’s decision to move away from the typical free-trial approach to selling SaaS is significant because it exemplifies a subtle trend which is brewing in the on-demand services market.

Although many SaaS solutions can be sold using a ‘try and buy’ technique, a growing number of SaaS vendors are discovering that they must employ other sales tactics to sell their solutions. In some cases, like the LucidEra example, it is because they are trying to demonstrate the power of their functionality to a target buyer who is unfamilar with the basic idea. … Read More »

Sometimes, even a free trial isn’t good enough to convince potential customers to buy a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

A case in point is LucidEra’s on-demand business intelligence (BI) solution. Even though the company is undoubtedly the thought-leader in this segment of the SaaS market and has experienced some success selling its solutions, the company has discovered that it takes more than the standard ‘try and buy’ sales approach to get customers to take advantage of its capabilities.

This is because LucidEra is aiming its on-demand BI solution at small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs), as well as those large-scale enterprises, which have not deployed BI products in the past because of their costs and complexities. Therefore, these prospective customers have little experience using a BI solution and need some hand-holding to fully understand how to utilize even a relatively easy solution like LucidEra’s.

To … Read More »

Despite growing customer adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), many companies and conservative industry observers still believe that SaaS solutions are simply a skinnied-down version of traditional, on-premise applications that offer little value add other than quicker deployment times and lower upfront costs.

IT/business decision-makers need look no further than at how today’s SaaS solutions are addressing age-old sales and marketing challenges to see that their capabilities go well beyond yesterday’s legacy software.

For instance, LucidEra announced a new offering today, called Lead Insight, which enables companies to analyize how marketing programs impact sales productivity. The LucidEra Lead Insight on-demand service offers over 65 prebuilt templates which enable users to analyze the quality and performance of their marketing leads and how effectively the sales team is converting these leads into opportunities and closed deals.

LucidEra’s new service enables companies to measure the cost effectiveness and … Read More »

Callidus Software Inc. announced todaythat it has been certified to offer its TrueComp® Suite on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.This announcement isn’t likely to generate bold headlines in the business or industry trade press. But, I believe it is a significant bellweather for the software industry and good news for organizations who have been worried that they’d have to make an either/or decision when selecting on-demand versus on-premise software solutions.

Until recently, the rapid rise of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a radical movement to displace legacy applications. As a consequence, SaaS was seen as a fundamental threat to the long-term viability of the independent, or as I prefer to say, “incumbent” software vendors (ISVs).

While on-demand, SaaS solutions represent a real challenge for legacy software vendors, it is no longer a simple battle of good (on-demand) versus evil (on-premise). Instead, both parties are recognizing that they … Read More »

SAP announced today that Shai Agassi, president of its product and technology group and architect of SAP’s Netweaver software, is leaving the company to pursue his interests in alternative energy and climate change.

While these are honorable reasons to move on, it is very likely that his departure was also prompted by the overwhelming challenges associated with migrating SAP’s software to an on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, as well as some executive suite politics.

In addition to his broader responsibilities, Agassi was the chief architect and senior champion for SAP’s on-demand efforts which were launched in February, 2006. He joined the company in 2001, when SAP acquired his company TopTier Software. He was also among several SAP executives considered a potential successor to Chief Executive Henning Kagermann, who recently had his employment contract extended through 2009, creating a bottleneck among his lieutenants, including … Read More »

While much of the information technology (IT) industry and many CIOs, concerned about their traditional legacy business intelligence (BI) applications, were focused on the market implications of Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion Software, new entries into the market may represent a more important milestone in the evolution of this segment of the software industry.

On March 6, 2007, LucidERA unveiled its new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business intelligence solution. The company is founded by one of the truly good guys of the industry, Ken Rudin, who also has a unique perspective on the opportunities and challenges represented by the SaaS model.

Ken started his career at Oracle. He then co-founded and was CEO of Emergent Corporation, a consulting firm focused on data warehousing projects for Fortune 500 companies which was sold to Keane, Inc. in 1999. At that point, Ken joined a new company, called … Read More »