LucidEra Releases Pipeline Insight Fall '08

Expanded analysis capabilities, faster speed highlight update

• By James E. Powell
• 10/10/2008

LucidEra, a business intelligence-as-a-service company, today released LucidEra Pipeline Insight Fall '08. The updated on-demand analytics platform and applications designed for sales teams now lets users create ad hoc, custom-calculated metrics that provide greater insight into a company’s sales. Using a set of built-in metrics (including win rates, length of an average sales cycle, and comparisons of new versus repeat business), customers can identify trends that were previously undetected.

The main feature in the upgrade is LucidEra’s Pipeline Healthcheck Service (PHS) that is designed for salesforce.com customers. Once access is granted to their data on the Salesforce.com service, LucidEra examines the data and within 48 hours provides the results of its analysis. LucidEra’s Pipeline Healthcheck is built on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence platform and uses best-practice metrics to help users increase revenue, reduce pipeline risk, and increase forecast accuracy. The feature identifies issues and opportunities in the sales pipeline.

For example, PHS can identify deals in a company’s forecast that are at risk based on historical trends. Lucidera told BI This Week that one customer’s site (an on-demand application company) had 80 percent of their reps focused on smaller deals (averaging $100K) and 20 percent of their reps focused on larger deals (averaging $1M). Pipeline Healthcheck’s analysis identified trends revealing that it took about the same amount of time to close either type of deal, and shifting 20 percent of the sales resources to larger sales could add $3.5M in annual revenue.

Likewise, a software infrastructure company determined that 70 percent of its deals in the pipeline were in the later sales stages, a historical high of $10M that would be good news when meeting the current quarter’s quota. However, historical trends also indicated that sales would fall short of the next quarter’s sales target by $2 million if no new sales were generated.

The company has also added analysis capabilities to its cloud-based solution, but users who prefer critical sales information in Excel spreadsheets or PDF documents can use the enhanced information sharing capabilities of the new version, such as one-click export, report delivery via e-mail, or scheduled delivery (through either spreadsheets or PDF documents); reports retain the formatting and descriptive information about sources, fields, and filters used in the report.

The Fall '08 Pipeline Insight release introduces several improvements for administrators such as the ability to search and mass edit standard and custom fields. Performance of the software-as-a-service platform is also improved, according to LucidEra, thanks to the introduction of frequently used report caching. LucidEra’s on-demand business intelligence platform automatically caches the most frequently used reports nightly to ensure optimal performance for line of business managers.

More information is available at http://www.lucidera.com.