socialmedian: LucidEra's demise is about money, not SaaS

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LucidEra's demise is about money, not SaaS

Source: Software as Services

Jun 24, 2009

Summary

I’ve been struck by the contrasting reactions to two separate company shutdowns that have taken place this week.

It emerged on Monday that SaaS business intelligence vendor LucidEra emailed customers late last week to inform them the company will cease operations at the end of this month. Immediately there was a flurry of blog posts debating what this meant for the future of SaaS and of SaaS BI in particular. Tech journalist Christina Torode even wrote that LucidEra’s demise harkens to ASP downfalls.

Monday also brought the news that Clear, a subscription service that operates fast-track security lanes for frequent travelers in a number of US airports, had abruptly ceased trading. No one blogged that its demise raised question marks over the future of business services sold on subscription, nor whether the notion of commercially operated fast-track channels was simply not viable (indeed many speculated who might enter the market to take Clear’s place). This was simply seen as a story about a company that couldn’t renegotiate a crucial loan, and went under.

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Comments (1)

Friarminor,

Jul 20, 2009

Tough times favor those with deeper coffers. What this means is that start-ups even if it's SaaS or not, will face an uphill climb when there isn't too many buying. It doesn't mean that SaaS isn't good because for all we know, the losses for traditional software companies may even be bigger except that they have enough funds to cushion the negative blows.