Combined sales and finance data gives salesforce.com customers agility into viewing and analyzing the entire sales cycle from forecasting opportunities to collecting cash

SAN MATEO, Calif.--LucidEra, the first provider of end-to-end on-demand Reporting and Analysis solutions that empower employees with instant visibility to their most needed data, today announced that LucidEra is now available through salesforce.com's AppExchange. For the first time, finance and sales executives at companies using salesforce.com’s on-demand platform and applications have access to a complete, on-demand reporting and analysis solution without any complex setup or need for consulting services.

To date, traditional enterprise BI software vendors have not fully addressed the information needs of the individual employee at small-to-medium sized businesses, having offered complex products that are difficult to manage and cost-prohibitive to deploy. In stark contrast, LucidEra delivers answers to employees quickly and simply by giving them the vital sales and financial information they need, on demand, without the need for consulting services to set up the solutions.

“The first on-demand revolution was for CRM and other transactional applications. These solutions were focused on getting the data ‘in’,” said Ken Rudin, co-founder and CEO of LucidEra. “LucidEra is leading the second major on-demand revolution – the ability to get the data ‘out’, and analyze all the data captured by transactional systems. By combining salesforce.com’s rich transactional platform with our robust analysis capabilities, we now provide a complete on-demand alternative to the traditional enterprise suite vendors’ solutions.”

LucidEra houses the platform that delivers the analysis capabilities, so the only thing that customers need to do to get up-and-running is to point LucidEra to their applications and other external data sources. Within hours, customers can reap the enormous benefits of LucidEra’s Reporting and Analysis solution.

LucidEra is the first company on AppExchange to introduce a revolutionary reporting and analysis user interface that eliminates any distinction between creating and viewing a report. Unlike traditional reporting solutions that require one interface for creating a report and another for viewing it, LucidEra lets employees drag and drop directly into a report the information they want to analyze. LucidEra is ideal for salesforce.com customers with limited internal resources because it requires no training or specialized skills to set up and begin using.

“More than 29,000 customer installs of hundreds of different on-demand applications clearly demonstrates the incredible momentum of the AppExchange and the on-demand model,” said George Hu, Chief Marketing Officer, salesforce.com. “Rapid adoption of on-demand applications shows that customers worldwide are rejecting expensive and complex implementations and long deployment cycles. Salesforce.com customers can now quickly and easily deploy LucidEra via the AppExchange to bring the power of the on-demand model to their business intelligence initiatives.”

LucidEra’s first prebuilt solution is designed for finance and sales operations managers. The LucidEra Forecast-to-Billing solution combines sales and marketing data from Salesforce with financial data from accounting applications, and with data from Excel and the Web to give employees visibility into what happens from the time you create a sales opportunity, to the time they invoice the customer. The drag and drop analysis capabilities provide employees deep insight into: understanding how long it takes for opportunities to turn into cash, and identifying actions to minimize cycle time; uncovering methods for driving new revenue opportunities; and identifying and understanding the cause of lost sales opportunities.

Salesforce Platform and the AppExchange

Salesforce Platform is the on-demand platform for the next generation of business applications. Salesforce Platform reinvents traditional customization and integration and enables a whole new generation of on-demand applications that go beyond client/server computing. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, enabling all the innovation that the Salesforce Platform unleashes to benefit the entire on-demand community.

More than 600 applications are now available on salesforce.com's AppExchange, the world's first on-demand application directory, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

About LucidEra

LucidEra delivers simple to set up, simple to use, and simple to buy reporting and analysis solutions on-demand. Our first prebuilt solution helps finance and sales executives view the financial impact from sales operations, from the time you meet a customer to the time you bill them. Founded in 2005, LucidEra was named “company to watch in 2007,” by several editorial and industry influencers. To try LucidEra, visit http://www.lucidera.com, or call 1-866-392-8008.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company’s Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. The Salesforce Platform, the world’s first on-demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com’s world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.

As of April 30, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 32,300 customers including ABN AMRO, America Online (AOL), Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, Staples and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.