Combined sales and finance data gives salesforce.com customers agility into viewing and analyzing the entire sales cycle from forecasting opportunities to collecting cash

LucidEra, the first provider of end-to-end on-demand Reporting and Analysis solutions that empower employees with instant visibility to their most needed data, today announced that LucidEra is now available through salesforce.com's AppExchange. For the first time, finance and sales executives at companies using salesforce.com’s on-demand platform and applications have access to a complete, on-demand reporting and analysis solution without any complex setup or need for consulting services.

To date, traditional enterprise BI software vendors have not fully addressed the information needs of the individual employee at small-to-medium sized businesses, having offered complex products that are difficult to manage and cost-prohibitive to deploy. In stark contrast, LucidEra delivers answers to employees quickly and simply by giving them the vital sales and financial information they need, on demand, without the need for consulting services to set up the solutions.

“The first on-demand revolution was for CRM and other transactional applications. These solutions were focused on getting the data ‘in’,” said Ken Rudin, co-founder and CEO of LucidEra. “LucidEra is leading the second major on-demand revolution – the ability to get the data ‘out’, and analyze all the data captured by transactional systems. By combining salesforce.com’s rich transactional platform with our robust analysis capabilities, we now provide a complete on-demand alternative to the traditional enterprise suite vendors’ solutions.”

LucidEra houses the platform that delivers the analysis capabilities, so the only thing that customers need to do to get up-and-running is to point LucidEra to their applications and other external data sources. Within hours, customers can reap the enormous benefits of LucidEra’s Reporting and Analysis solution.

LucidEra is the first company on AppExchange to introduce a revolutionary reporting and analysis user interface that eliminates any distinction between creating and viewing a report. Unlike traditional reporting solutions that require one interface for creating a report and another for viewing it, LucidEra lets employees drag and drop directly into a report the information they want to analyze. LucidEra is ideal for salesforce.com customers with limited internal resources because it requires no training or specialized skills to set up and begin using.

“More than 29,000 customer installs of hundreds of different on-demand applications clearly demonstrates the incredible momentum of the AppExchange and the on-demand model,” said George Hu, Chief Marketing Officer, salesforce.com. “Rapid adoption of on-demand applications shows that customers worldwide are rejecting expensive and complex implementations and long deployment cycles. Salesforce.com customers can now quickly and easily deploy LucidEra via the AppExchange to bring the power of the on-demand model to their business intelligence initiatives.”

LucidEra’s first prebuilt solution is designed for finance and sales operations managers. The LucidEra Forecast-to-Billing solution combines sales and marketing data from Salesforce with financial data from accounting applications, and with data from Excel and the Web to give employees visibility into what happens from the time you create a sales opportunity, to the time they invoice the customer. The drag and drop analysis capabilities provide employees deep insight into: understanding how long it takes for opportunities to turn into cash, and identifying actions to minimize cycle time; uncovering methods for driving new revenue opportunities; and identifying and understanding the cause of lost sales opportunities.