LucidEra

About LucidEra

LucidEra emerged in 2005 as a business intelligence (BI) provider operating on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The company was founded by Ken Rudin, John Sichi, and Tai Tran and was headquartered in San Mateo, California. Ken Rudin, the CEO, had a background that included roles as a vice president at Siebel Systems and Salesforce.com, which provided him with deep insights into CRM systems. The firm's objective was to deliver on-demand BI, aiming to simplify access to corporate information and analysis.

The company's core business involved providing a BI platform focused on analyzing data from CRM and ERP systems. LucidEra's strategy was to offer prebuilt analytic applications for specific functions like sales pipeline analysis, order analysis, and sales lead analysis. It initially focused on integrating data from Salesforce.com, with standard connectors also available for NetSuite and Oracle Order Management. The business model was subscription-based, with a monthly fee that included licenses for multiple users, a cost structure designed to be significantly lower than traditional on-premise BI installations. Its target clients were small- and mid-size businesses, as well as larger enterprises that had previously found BI solutions to be too complex or costly.

LucidEra's technology was built on a generic BI platform that supported its vertical solutions and relied on open-source software like JBoss and Mondrian. A key component of their technology, including ETL and metadata capabilities, was adapted from source code acquired from Broadbase. The company was also a key contributor to the LucidDB open-source project. One of its notable products was 'Forecast-to-Billing', launched in March 2007, which pulled data from CRM and accounting systems to provide visibility into sales and marketing processes. This was later enhanced with 'LucidSnapShots' to add historical analysis capabilities. Another offering was the 'Pipeline Healthcheck' service, which analyzed a company's sales pipeline to identify risks and opportunities.

The company secured Series A funding from Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners, followed by a $15.6 million Series B round in 2007 led by Crosslink Capital. Despite initial success and growing customer adoption, LucidEra faced significant challenges. As a "SaaS 1.0" era company, it had to build and maintain its own architecture, leading to high overhead costs. The economic downturn that began in 2008 made it difficult to secure further funding or an acquisition. The company's focus on a standardized data model lacked the flexibility some customers required, and its later attempts to handle multiple data sources came too late. Ultimately, LucidEra ran out of money and ceased operations in June 2009.