Ted’s post includes a summary of his conversation with LucidEra’s own Ken Rudin, who happens to agree with Howard Dresner’s keynote conclusion that, smaller vendors are sprouting and filling the market’s “vacuum” of innovation.

As always, Mark Madsen has posted his colorful (and thought-provoking) slides, which I’ve embedded below. My favorite quote is on slide 35:

“Better experiences, not more features.” Roland Rust

Last week I had a discussion with Alex Jefferies, who is currently working on two new Aberdeen research reports on sales effectiveness and the impact of social networking. With mounting pressures to increase top-line revenue growth, is your sales organization taking advantage of social media to drive performance?

Take the Sales 2.0: Getting Social About Selling survey and you’ll get a complimentary copy of the results when the research report is published later this year.

“Future computing platforms are likely to be even more Web-centric and IT organizations would do well to consider “getting their heads into the clouds” soon.”

If you’re a developer who is just getting your head into the cloud, you might find this overview of the OSCON presentation on LucidDB to be interesting. Speaking of open source business intelligence, here’s another thought-provoking and informative presentation from industry thought leader Mark Marksen from Third Nature on the topic:

Have a great weekend.

1) An interactive webinar on Wednesday, August 13th at 11am PST

Lead Alchemy - Turn Marketing Leads into Sales Gold

Executives from Phone Works, Serena Software and LucidEra will be discussing critical best-practices designed to help Salesforce.com customers establish the right processes and metrics that will convert marketing leads into closed business.

Leading decision makers and managers will gather in New York City to learn how to optimally apply sales, marketing, and customer service tools and techniques by utilizing the right mix of people, processes, and technologies.

LucidEra is a Platinum sponsor of the event and Ken Rudin will be delivering a session on Tuesday called, Analytics: The Critical Second Half of CRM Success.

We hope you can join us.

I’ve been hearing some rumors about the AppExchange and pending announcements from Salesforce about the Force.com platform lately, so I was very pleased to receive this Category Newsletter today. Subscibers can select an AppExchange category and then, according to the email, get ready to:

• Check out the top 5 apps your colleagues can’t live without (both free and fee-based)
• Discover brand-new solutions customers are raving about
• Read real-world customer success stories
• Benefit from insight-filled white papers

It’s good to see Salesforce put some marketing muscle into the AppExchange. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

The editorial by Gerhard Gschwandtner, publisher of Selling Power, provides an overview of the CSO Insights 2008 Sales Optimization Survey. He asks the following questions to VPs of Sales:

• Who generates your leads?
• What happens to the deals in your pipeline?
• Do your salespeople research prospects before each call?
• Do your salespeople sell value and avoid discounting?
• Do you sweep failures under the rug?
• Do you hire reps that succeed?
• What’s your goal?

My favorite part of Gerhard’s overview is the following statement:

“The survey says 43.8 percent of the sales organizations need improvement in these areas. Your CRM solution isn’t going to help. What will help is a best-practice sharing system that harnesses the collective intelligence of your sales organization. The SavoGroup.com can connect all reps with the best practices of your top performers. LucidEra and Business Objects offer better analytics that drive better decisions.”

You can read the full article here and download the full survey here (registration required).

• LucidEra listed as one of the “Top Seven SaaS Startups” by Sramana Mitra.
• LucidEra appoints Robert Reid to drive our next phase of growth.
• Sales 2.0 interview with Ken Rudin (see the video below)

You can now also subscribe to our news RSS feed if you’d like to keep up with the latest LucidEra updates. For example, I noticed this useful summary of some of the key players in the business intelligence market today.

It’s interesting to look at why a service like this is so popular, and why it is so valuable to customers.  How is it possible that in just 48 hours, a third party can look at a company’s data and identify issues and opportunities that the company didn’t know about?  In our case, when we deliver a Pipeline Healthcheck, it’s certainly the case that we don’t have in-depth knowledge of how the company works or what their biggest business challenges are.  So how does a 48 hour assessment provide real value?

The answer lies in the fact that the vast majority of business people have never been taught how to analyze the area of their business that they’re responsible for.  Finance is an exception, since most people with a finance degree have taken several classes on how to interpret financial statements and how to manage by key metrics.  But for the rest of us, managing the things we’re responsible for is done more as an art than as a science.  Looking at sales in particular, how many of us were ever taught how to analyze our pipeline?  Universities don’t have classes on the topic.  Even business schools don’t.  And most companies don’t teach it to their employees either.

Traditional Business Intelligence has tried to provide tools to help people gain insight into their businesses so they can figure out what actions to take to grow their companies.  But there is a fundamental flaw with this approach: as I stated above, people don’t know what to do with these tools.  They don’t know what questions to ask.  They have to make it up as they go.  That is, they don’t know what they don’t know.

So, I thought it would be useful to go through the mental exercise of doing something like a “Healthcheck” for the BI industry to see what issues and opportunities I’d uncover there.  Let’s start with a general framework for what BI is about, often referred to as the Three A’s:  Access, Analyze, Action.  This is the core value proposition that traditional BI vendors have always touted — they give you simplified access to data (often, this data comes from multiple sources), then you analyze the data to find insights, and then that leads to taking positive action in your company.

Access: If I were grading the industry, I’d give it a “B” here.  From some perspectives, the industry has done well.  Before BI and Analytic solutions were available, getting access to the data you needed was pretty cumbersome, particularly if that data resided in multiple systems.  For example, you had to go to your CRM system to get pipeline information, but your ERP system had information on actual bookings and discount amounts.  BI solutions have made that much easier by bringing the data you need into one place, and providing multiple convenient ways to get the data either through a web browser, through being embedded in enterprise applications (often via mashups), being sent via email, as cellphone-based alerts, etc.

But, another aspect of access is “is it available to everyone?”  Here, there is a huge opportunity to make BI and Analytics far more accessible.  Given the cost, complexity, and skill sets needed to implement and manage traditional BI solutions, most smaller and midsized companies have been left out in the cold.  This is one of the major reasons that the SaaS model for BI is becoming so popular — the vendor does all the heavy lifting regarding the infrastructure, making it available to everyone.

Analyze: I’d give the industry a “C” here.  Traditional BI has focused on giving people powerful tools to answer almost any question they can think of asking when they analyze their business.  But, it misses the main point that people don’t know what questions they should be asking.  It’s like giving a patient a full set of state-of-the-art medical equipment, and telling them that they can now go diagnose their own health.

There are two major actions we need to take here.  First, we need to move away from the concept of “BI as a tool” and move towards “BI as an application.”  That is, we need to stop thinking that the right solution is a tool that let’s us answer any question we can ask, and start focusing on prebuilt analytic applications designed for specific roles in a company that include best practices to guide people towards the things they should be looking at.  Second, we need to help educate customers about using analysis effectively.  The SaaS model means we don’t have to pay consultants as much money to implement BI for us.  So, take the savings there and apply the resources towards educating employees on how to use analysis effectively in their roles.  People want, and need, help using analysis.  As one of our customers recently commented on a prior blog post,

[Smaller organizations] do not have the budget for a sales operations person (typically) let alone a full-time analytics person. We absolutely need a tool that can start us in the right direction and then let us tune it to our business… which, in my experience, Lucidera does very well so far.

Our industry needs to put more energy into helping people understand what they should be looking at and why.  The products need to embody best practices, and the services should focus on the “why” of analytics, not the “how.”

Action: This one gets a “D”.  If people don’t know what they should be looking at, then they’re not getting valuable insights, so there’s nothing to act on.  Using the patient analogy above, assuming the patient had no prior medical training, he’d probably just be able to take his own pulse.  As long as it was reasonably normal, he’d assume he’s healthy, and there’d be no action to take.  Until we make it much easier for people to understand what they should analyze and why, there won’t be much progress here.  But, if we can change this, whole industries can reinvent themselves.  Once the manufacturing industry went from the purely skill-based artisan / apprentice model to the production line with data driven manufacturing processes, we launched the industrial age.  Similar things are waiting to happen to other industries.

I find it fascinating that people have been crying out for a long time about needing simpler Business Intelligence solutions and more guidance, yet historically the only response has been to add even more features to an already complicated solution.  If the response to our Pipeline Healthchecks is any indication, a new approach to analysis is emerging — one that incorporates best practices and guidance.

• “User-centric” not “Data-centric” approaches are promoted as the future of business intelligence in this post.
• Stephen Few calls Seth Godin to the mat with a few data visualization tips. (Meanwhile, I’ve been spending quality time on this useful baby name visualization site.)
• LucidEra (and Twitter) are recognized by AlwaysOn as Global 250 winners.

Now here’s Rush on the Colbert Report. Good stuff!

Have a great weekend!