"I am not happy to see LucidEra disappearing. It is not a good sign for the SaaS BI market in general and the startups in our space specifically," Good Data CEO Roman Stanek said in a blog .

However, he added, "LucidEra was probably too expensive for small companies and too limited for large ones. ... I am sure we will see the era of success of on-demand analytics."

Overall, SaaS BI remains a small niche in the overall market, with various products often focusing on a particular area of business, such as sales or human resources, according to a recent Forrester Research report.

The SaaS model for BI does have some advantages, such as lower up-front costs due to subscription pricing, as well as quicker implementation and little to no burden on internal IT teams. But those pluses in turn can mean "a loss of control and integration with the rest of the enterprise data, information, and processes," the report added.