LucidEra's Demise - What It Means For Smaller, Single-Solution Vendors

Helena Schwenk of Ovum Research has a nice post analyzing LucidEra’s failure and what it means for the other SAAS BI players. Helena concludes,

 

 The spotlight is now likely to shine very brightly on other SaaS BI companies (…) While LucidEra’s collapse doesn’t necessarily mark the end of SaaS BI as we know it, it could mark the start of a SaaS shift towards larger BI players whose brand and broad portfolios continue to dominate the market.

What Helena points out will certainly happen. The “M” in SMBs, will now look at the smaller, one-product SaaS BI vendors with more caution – and rightly so. But they don’t have that many places to look at. The solutions offered by larger BI vendors are typically more expensive and complex and that puts businesses in a bind. They may have to stick with using the good old spreadsheets as their only BI tool (read why spreadsheets aren’t that good a choice).

Zoho Analytics is bridging the gap by providing a more powerful solution for analyzing data than a spreadsheet or simple pivot table, but not something as complex as a Business Objects implementation. An enterprise opting for Zoho CRM, Mail, Projects, Meeting and other Zoho services can easily take advantage of Zoho Analytics for analyzing its data. Its simple, spreadsheet-like interface makes it easy for the users to build, view and share reports. And its various import options allow companies to upload as well as push data from applications or databases behind the firewall easily. Zoho Analytics is free as of now and the pricing to be announced soon will be in the lines of other Zoho products – an ample free version accompanied by very affordable pricing plans.

Helena also makes another good point. Customers always want to know that their investments will be safe in the long term. Zoho Corporation serves the technology needs of more than 40,000 customers worldwide. We have been profitable in every year since our inception in 1996. Customers who are looking for a stable BI partner who is investing in an easy-to-use, reliable BI platform for the long-term will find an excellent tool in Zoho Analytics.