Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJ), a French company that provides business intelligence (BI) to enterprises, is riding high on superlative second quarter performance announced on July 25. All its 3 major revenue lines – licensed software (Q2/07 revenue $149 million, up 21% year-over-year), maintenance ($152 million, +23% y-o-y) and global services ($62 million, +29% y-o-y) –
By David Hatch, Guest Author Unstructured information is considered by many to represent over 80% of an organization’s data, and yet it remains largely untouched by conventional BI approaches such as query and reporting tools. This includes text analytics and federated search of customer service notes, call center dialog, web pages, web logs, word documents,
By David Hatch, Guest Author In my last post, I discussed how On-Demand BI may not be just for SMBs, based on some recent research findings, and that corporate plans for On-Demand delivery of BI applications (SaaS, Hosting, BI-Appliances) may be gaining ground within organizations of all sizes more rapidly than has been generally reported.
SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? KR: Finding the right executive team members can be a nerve-wracking experience. You are essentially giving a huge amount of responsibility to a person who in many cases you’ve only known for a few weeks during the interview process. A key
SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Any other metrics you track? KR: We launched our service in Q2 of this year, and the response has been fantastic. We’ve already signed up our first set of paying customers, which is a great milestone for us. Initially, our primary goals are
SM: What are your top target segments? KR: We are finding a lot of success with Sales Operations managers, VP of Sales and also the CFO or Director of Finance at small and medium size companies. Those with a slightly distributed workforce and who don’t want the hassle of managing the cost associated with traditional
SM: Describe the value proposition of LucidEra, including differentiation versus the rest of the market. KR: LucidEra combines sales and financial data to give users at small-to-mid sized businesses powerful insight into the effectiveness of their entire sales operations process (including quotas, pipeline, revenues, and expenses). We firmly believe that just like the everyday consumer
SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? KR: When we founded the company in 2005, the BI market was pretty stagnant. Not much innovation had happened in that market in the prior 10 years. It was basically a lot of vendors selling expensive solutions that were difficult and time consuming