The LucidEra's shut down

This week, the rumor about the LucidEra is shutting its operations down spread on internet. Unfortunately, the rumor became true, with the news published in many sites:

Jeff Kelly posted in Search Data Management yesterday:
"The vendor sent an email to customers on Thursday with the news and pledged to help them wind down their relationship with the company and its SaaS-based BI products by the end of June, said Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing at LucidEra, in a phone interview.

LucidEra's decision to shut down was brought about by a lack of funding, not a lack of interest in its products or in SaaS BI as a whole, Cunningham said. He would not go into details regarding LucidEra's financial problems other than to say, "It was a matter of funding or being acquired. And neither of those things happened."

Today, Doug Henschen posted in Intelligent Enterprise:
"Darren Cunningham, LucidEra's VP of Marketing, responded to inquiries 6/23 at 3:40 pm ET with the following e-mail message:

All that I can say at this time is that our product and pipeline were both stronger than they'd ever been. Customer adoption was growing, which was reflected in the 20+ 5-star reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange since January. We got hit by just really, really bad timing to have to be raising our next round of funding in this economic climate.

Right now, various options are being looked at in the best interest of our creditors, customers, employees, and shareholders. There should be resolution for everyone involved soon so there is an orderly transition."

LucidEra is a SaaS BI startup, founded in 2005, and according their website: "LucidEra was formed to shake up the stagnant business intelligence industry and traditional approaches to corporate information access and analysis by delivering business visibility as an on-demand service."

Also according their website, the company's last round of funding came in August 2007, when it raised $15.6 million in Series B funding.

In my opinion, the LucidEra's shut down does not mean that the SaaS business model failed. There are market for both SaaS(on-demand) and traditional BI(on-premise).