Can you take the IT department out of BI?

Business intelligence and the IT department just seem to go hand in hand.  In fact, most people will tell you that there's no way to have BI if you don't have a fully equipped, completely staffed IT department (and lots of available capital) to invest in it.  Most people.  Ken Rudin will tell you differently.

Ken is the CEO of a BI company called LucidEra.  The company is about as fledgling as it gets.  They've been testing their first product, which goes into beta testing status in November, on a few select pilot companies.  One of the pilot customers is IronPort, an e-mail appliance provider.  Until they began using the LucidEra product, the company had been pulling information from web-based applications like SalesForce.com and NetSuite, plugging that information into spreadsheets, and then trying to make sense of it from there.

To say it wasn't working might be a world-class understatement.  The LucidEra product is actually an easy to implement product that pulls information from various sources, including programs like SalesForce.com, web data, and traditional enterprise solutions, plugs that information into pre-built reports and provides some of the most common BI answers that organizations are looking for.

And that, says Ken, is the key.  His stance is that most organizations are looking for answers to very similar questions.  The problem is that most BI applications are too customized, meaning they require too much work and too much investment to find the answers being sought.  And in the event that a more customized solution is needed, there are some customization options in the LucidEra program.

In total it takes a few weeks to get the program set up.  This is compared to a more traditional BI solution that could take months to put into place.  And here's the best part: the basic solution that goes into beta testing in November starts at about $3,000 per month for the initial setup, and up to five users per month.   Additional users are around $50 per seat.

It's affordable.  But how valuable will it be?  The first solution to become available will be a forecast-to-billing solution that tracks data from  the forecast cycle through the billing cycle.  It's a retail-oriented solution, and until wide-spread adoption  occurs, it's hard to say how successful it will be.  However, if you're interested in trying out the program, you can pop over to the company web site and sign up for the beta program.  It's a qualification program, which means that you provide your information and the company will call you to make sure the program is a fit for your organization.  But if you're in this market, it might be worth trying.  (If you do, share your thoughts with us on this blog.  I'd love to know how it works for you.)

It's an interesting concept.  A BI solution that doesn't try to do everything, but instead tries to do one or two things very well.  It's a concept that could go a long way in BI, but only time will tell how useful the idea really is.  And if it does work, maybe the concept will free the IT department for other, different projects.