You Calc. We Analyze ;-)

The LucidEra demise brought me to this article. Rasmus compares Good Data with YouCalc. He claims that the key benefit of YouCalc is that it is directly accessing SalesForce, HighRise or Google data instead uploading them to a syndicated storage. The YouCalc approach is called REPORTING. It is not good or bad, it is just different from what we do. Rasmus should rather compare his company to BIRT, JasperSoft or others. The comparison with LucidEra, PivotLink or Good Data just doesn't stick.

Let me explain why on a simple example. We found that trending is one of the most interesting analyses (not only in the CRM area). Pipeline keeps changing. Average sales rep tends to be optimistic the first month of each quarter. The optimism is going down as the end of quarter approaches. To analyze the attitude of individual salesman or a sales team, analytical vendor needs to collect data snapshots on regular basis and analyze the pipeline changes in between these snapshots. Reporting applications like YouCalc can't do trending analysis (unless very few cases when the original data provider has decided to snapshot their data and give YouCalc access to the snapshots) as well as many others.

Rasmus is right, the direct access to data is something what differentiates Good Data from YouCalc. This is what puts Good Data to analysis and YouCalc to reporting categories. I'm sure that the primary reason why LucidEra is gone is very different.