News & Views

June 20, 2007 from mycustomer.com – “Last year NetSuite upped its marketing ante with a witty mickey take of Star Wars – featuring the evil Darth New Kid who bore an uncanny resemblance to rival Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. This week’s launch of NetSuite 2007 in London saw another entertainment theme in play, this time the 1970s US TV series Kung Fu…

This was the first time that a NetSuite release had premiered outside of the US. The new version has three main planks: Easy ERP, Global CRM and SuiteAnalytics. “Easy ERP is something of an oxymoron,” said Zach Nelson. “We’ve introduced Netsuite assistants for set up, data import, matrix items, forms, e-commerce set up and e-commerce content.”

“To date there has been no real global control over CRM. What multinationals need is to manage subsidiaries of firms in a single instance of NetSuite. You can have hierarchical view of the organisation in real time. We also have a single data model so we have single data warehouse sitting under NetSuite and added more and more layers of BI functionality to the products. Our first dashboard had pre-canned KPIs. In 2004 we let third party BI tools link to it. In 2005, we added on-demand dashboard alerts. Now we’re announcing ability to embed any formula you like into the applications so that you can do excel–like calculations.”

180 View – At the launch, Zach apparently took on some of his rivals with “SAP is characterised by lot of power and not so much ease,” and “On the other hand, Salesforce.com is ease without power.” And “The Sage business model is to buy lots of products, then live on the maintenance revenue from them.” As we didn’t attend the launch, we don’t know exactly what was said but you can bet Zach either had great things to say or did not say anything at all about Oracle considering Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle and a majority owner of NetSuite.