The end of LucidEra

LucidEra is closing its door alongside other BI and enterprise software firms. I have wonder how much SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco’s stranglehold on the enterprise market is hampering investment in third-party software. At this point, I imagine that ISVs can’t just produce a marginally better product with high maintenance/support/consulting costs. Besides, I am not sure that BI is viable as a SaaS business due to high integration and professional costs.

IT Business Edge blogger Dennis Bryon wrote about the demise of Flowgram earlier this month, and now LucidEra is going belly-up. This TDWIarticle largely faults an ugly venture capital environment rather than the viability of the SaaS revenue model for LucidEra’s problems

VCs are reluctant to fund enterprise software too – SaaS is going to be adopted far more at the lower end and Google or someone else (Zoho?) is going to benefit due to scale and delivery/distribution cost efficiencies:

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) specialist LucidEra this week confirmed that it is effectively ceasing operation. Its competitors claim that it is actively shopping for an interested buyer. Meanwhile, data warehouse (DW) appliance player Dataupia – which named a new CEO in March and, just last month, laid off nearly two-thirds of its workforce – struggles to attract fresh capital.

Capital is the crux: sources familiar with both vendors cite VC funding as a common culprit, the result of a brutal economic climate in which venture capitalists have grown wary of start-up investments.