NetSuite’s Big Moment

This spring has seen a raft of software company events and announcements and they’ve been good meetings full of real news and important new developments.  It is as if these companies bided their time during the worst of the recession building new product, thinking about the future and how customers will use their technologies.  It was time well spent.

Last week SAP, NetSuite and others have held meetings and more good news seems to be emanating from their conferences.  I attended the NetSuite SuiteWorld event in San Francisco and that’s what I want to write about here.

For at least two years most ERP vendors have been championing the idea of a two tier ERP strategy.  I’ve heard messaging from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and NetSuite and, plus or minus a few wrinkles, the idea is that conventional ERP built for the late twentieth century is tired.  But rather than scrapping the huge investment in blood sweat, toil, tears and a not inconsiderable number of dollars, most companies deploying new ERP will be doing so in ways that surround the original deployments rather than replacing them.

That was the story up to last year and it was a good and logical one.  Vendors loved it.  Two tiers made the old system with its high maintenance charges a fixture for at least another decade while giving everyone a chance at new business.  For customers, few thought ERP was broke and even fewer had an appetite for fixing it.  But many did have serious needs to fill in what old ERP lacked — the social, mobile, cloud, big data issues that won’t go away.  To this you should add commerce, which will bring us current.

One of the hidden themes running throughout the software industry today — a theme that no one other than me, I sometimes think, ruminates on — is the high cost of energy required for doing business.  Escalating transportation costs factor into the social, mobile, cloud etc. alluded to above as well as what I’m going into next.

So back to the present, San Francisco and SuiteWorld.  In his keynote today CEO Zach Nelson unveiled a comprehensive approach to ecommerce running off NetSuite’s financials called SuiteCommerce.  Now, NetSuite has been offering ecommerce solutions for many years and they already have successful customers running commerce sites (about 2,800) off their financials and integrating other important modules like their warehouse system.

The difference today is in emphasis, partners and application development tools from NetSuite that brings everything together in a solution set that aims the company at being a significant player in a new generation of integrated and flexible back to front office systems.  Parenthetically, this is how disruptive innovations take root which should provide no comfort to the major ERP players basking in their apparent good luck.

In announcing SuiteCommerce, NetSuite has added a third tier to the conventional ERP wisdom.  The major difference between two and three tiers is the emphasis on reaching customers through the commerce solution and the recognition that NetSuite, at least, owns two out of three levels.

This has big implications for all businesses.  As Nelson correctly pointed out, the demand for some of this new commerce approach will not come from you and me but from the devices we use to run our lives.  The fridge is out of beer so it signals the store or at least my personal device to remind me to pick some up.  The car needs service — already a cliché but nonetheless an important reality — so it negotiates a service appointment.  On and on it goes.

The Internet of things will be much bigger than the Internet of people and the Internet of things will be a major acquisition portal for business and consumers as well as a major user of automated commerce technologies.  Commerce solutions that make it easier for people to buy and receive products through efficient channels is a great first step.

Back to transportation costs.  The Internet of things will be instrumental at consolidating demand and ensuring that supply arrives in the most efficient way, easing the transport issue all the way up the supply chain.  Of course, the Internet of things will also enable actions that have no commerce involvement and it’s important to recognize but not to delve into here.

What makes SuiteCommerce appealing is the “something for everyone” approach.  NetSuite’s financials can act as a data hub funneling necessary product and pricing data to user interfaces including their own as well as third parties.  The financials, shipping and invoicing technologies provide the critical single source of the truth that has become a NetSuite mantra.  And powerful tools make it possible for developers and business users to make or modify commerce systems at, well, the speed of business.

So there’s a lot to like coming from NetSuite today.  Earlier, the company announced revenues of nearly $70 million for the last quarter and the CEO repeated his guidance that the company would generate $300 million in the coming fiscal year.  While he was at it, Nelson also announced new partnerships with Grant Thornton, and Deloitte’s sprawling digital business group.  So there will be plenty of help on the implementation side, which is most important in the two or three tier approach in dealing with the very large companies that are beginning to flock to NetSuite.

I can’t say that three or even two tier solutions were on my radar when I first contemplated SaaS for ERP.  Honestly, I thought ERP for the cloud was an exercise in squaring a circle.  But it seems like the industry has a plan at last and innovation continues at the margin where NetSuite is carving out quite a position for itself.

Story from http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/49041/netsuites-big-moment/

NetSuite SuiteWorld Part 2: Growth of the Platform Ecosystem

By Brian Sommer | May 21, 2012, 11:26am PDT

Summary: Part 2 of NetSuite SuiteWorld big points: The Partner ecosystem of NetSuite is definitely gaining momentum. But, is the growth consistent with other major platform ecosystems? How is it differing?

There were many announcements at the SuiteWorld (NetSuite’s user conference) last week that involved new channel partners and other developments within the NetSuite platform ecosystem. Briefly, NetSuite added Deloitte to its large integrator partner roster which previously included Accenture and Wipro. Similarly, NetSuite announced additional partnerships with midmarket professional services firms such as Blythe & Co. and Grant Thornton. Previously, they established relationships with Baker Tilly (a current client of my firm), McGladrey and others.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson indicated that the company now has 5500+ developers building and extending applications on the NetSuite platform and platform toolset. I asked Zach about how the size of his current ecosystem compares with the ecosystems of Salesforce.com’s Force.com, Google’s Android environment and Apple’s iOS environment. These environments often count hundreds of thousands of developers within their ecosystems.

Zack responded along the lines of NetSuite attempting to build a high-quality ecosystem focused on a more structured rational approach to building out new products, new product extensions and an environment where different partner products can be more easily tested for potential conflicts from one product to the next. In other words, NetSuite is attempting to build a higher quality platform ecosystem versus a high quantity of developers.

In a subsequent briefing a few of us had with NetSuite chief operating officer Jim McGeever, we learned that NetSuite is not interested in “press release partners“. His comments reminded me of sage advice given to me by a senior Accenture partner when I was in the running for a partnership slot. This partner told me “there are partners and there are partners that count“. Clearly, focusing on the partners that count is what got me promoted and appears to be the modus operandi of the NetSuite executive team when it comes to recruiting, developing and directing the partners within its ecosystem.

Jim also shared a number of other insights involving the management of partners in the partner ecosystem. He is acutely concerned about the ability of two different partner solutions to coexist in a functioning, compatible manner. It is not enough for a partner’s product or product extensions to work with the NetSuite core applications, they also must interoperate successfully with the applications of other partner products.

NetSuite apparently has a long-term product roadmap that it is sharing with selected partners. Within this roadmap, NetSuite has identified core functionality that NetSuite has already or will soon develop on its own. Secondarily, it has identified specific functional areas it would like partners to more fully develop with product extensions and/or all-new applications. Jim indicated that some integrators, notably midmarket and smaller integrators, are requesting the right to develop specific vertical applications or application suites. Larger integrators prefer to discuss a number of major opportunity spaces that may become mutually beneficial to both parties. Either way, NetSuite wins as its product line becomes more competitive, more complete and more cost-effective to sell as channel partners will take an ever greater role in developing the markets and closing deals involving the broadening NetSuite product line.

One of the NetSuite executives in these briefings added that the company develops the roadmap and potential enhancements from listening to the requests of customers and the marketplace. I’m quite familiar with this process as it is one commonly used by many software companies. However, the problem with this approach is that often leads a software company to continue to enhance existing products that it sells to its existing customers at the expense of creating visionary, transformative and amazingly all new products that capture the hearts and minds of the customers to come. Steve Jobs, in my estimation, was absolutely brilliant at that understanding what to put in and what to leave out of products developed by Apple. I seriously doubt that Steve Jobs consulted a list of customer functional enhancements to determine what would eventually go into products that we know today as the iPhone, iPod or iPad. Should NetSuite desire breakthrough product innovations within its partner ecosystem, then it needs a mechanism to create breakthrough innovation not just incremental innovation around the periphery of its product line.

NetSuite executives also expressed a desire to retain the integrity of its core product line. It discourages partners from developing functionality that is redundant with existing functionality within the core processes NetSuite currently supports. They welcome products that extend existing applications, do not serve as functional substitutes or become direct replacements of NetSuite applications. Moreover, they do not want partners to build products that insert themselves in the middle of NetSuite processes unless these insertions yield truly high-value added capabilities for the mutual customer base.

What can we conclude from NetSuite’s partner strategy?

NetSuite appears to be building a very deliberate, not chaotic, partner ecosystem. Rapid product line expansion and functional improvements seemed to be at the top of their priorities. Cross product integration is clearly a management priority.

One group of potential partners was not apparent to me: providers of external data sources that could enrich existing processes. I did see CCH, a provider of tax table maintenance and other data, in the exhibitor hall. But, most of the firms in the exhibition area were clearly selling add-on modules, standalone applications that integrate with NetSuite applications, reporting/analyst tools, HR software, consulting services, etc. Providers of external data were not abundant, in my opinion. That needs to be a thrust for next year’s event.

The quality of the NetSuite partner group continues to improve. Like a fine wine or cheese, the partner community seems to get better with the passage of time. Bigger systems integrators, more channel partners, more complementary technologies, etc. would define the environment I saw at this year’s show.

Big, global systems integrators may provide headlines for NetSuite; however, I was not overly impressed with the degree of actual commitment from these providers. One NetSuite executive pegged the number of Accenture deals involving NetSuite software at approximately 2 dozen. Deloitte is currently working on a similar sized number of deals. Yet, some significantly smaller firms are already pushing deal sizes of 10 or more clients today. This would indicate that large systems integrators may be:

• still moving very slowly away from on-premise work to multi-tenant, cloud application software
• taking a wait-and-see attitude before jumping in with full-blown investments in training and product development around new age products like NetSuite and its NS-BOS platform
• not so nimble or advanced as their marketing might suggest

I would recommend that NetSuite lean hard on its large global integrator partners to see just how committed they really are to the space, to the NetSuite platform, to building out the NetSuite ecosystem and to NetSuite specifically.

Story from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sommer/netsuite-suiteworld-part-2-growth-of-the-platform-ecosystem/1202

NetSuite SuiteWorld Part 2: Growth of the Platform Ecosystem

By Brian Sommer | May 21, 2012, 11:26am PDT

Summary: Part 2 of NetSuite SuiteWorld big points: The Partner ecosystem of NetSuite is definitely gaining momentum. But, is the growth consistent with other major platform ecosystems? How is it differing?

There were many announcements at the SuiteWorld (NetSuite’s user conference) last week that involved new channel partners and other developments within the NetSuite platform ecosystem. Briefly, NetSuite added Deloitte to its large integrator partner roster which previously included Accenture and Wipro. Similarly, NetSuite announced additional partnerships with midmarket professional services firms such as Blythe & Co. and Grant Thornton. Previously, they established relationships with Baker Tilly (a current client of my firm), McGladrey and others.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson indicated that the company now has 5500+ developers building and extending applications on the NetSuite platform and platform toolset. I asked Zach about how the size of his current ecosystem compares with the ecosystems of Salesforce.com’s Force.com, Google’s Android environment and Apple’s iOS environment. These environments often count hundreds of thousands of developers within their ecosystems.

Zack responded along the lines of NetSuite attempting to build a high-quality ecosystem focused on a more structured rational approach to building out new products, new product extensions and an environment where different partner products can be more easily tested for potential conflicts from one product to the next. In other words, NetSuite is attempting to build a higher quality platform ecosystem versus a high quantity of developers.

In a subsequent briefing a few of us had with NetSuite chief operating officer Jim McGeever, we learned that NetSuite is not interested in “press release partners“. His comments reminded me of sage advice given to me by a senior Accenture partner when I was in the running for a partnership slot. This partner told me “there are partners and there are partners that count“. Clearly, focusing on the partners that count is what got me promoted and appears to be the modus operandi of the NetSuite executive team when it comes to recruiting, developing and directing the partners within its ecosystem.

Jim also shared a number of other insights involving the management of partners in the partner ecosystem. He is acutely concerned about the ability of two different partner solutions to coexist in a functioning, compatible manner. It is not enough for a partner’s product or product extensions to work with the NetSuite core applications, they also must interoperate successfully with the applications of other partner products.

NetSuite apparently has a long-term product roadmap that it is sharing with selected partners. Within this roadmap, NetSuite has identified core functionality that NetSuite has already or will soon develop on its own. Secondarily, it has identified specific functional areas it would like partners to more fully develop with product extensions and/or all-new applications. Jim indicated that some integrators, notably midmarket and smaller integrators, are requesting the right to develop specific vertical applications or application suites. Larger integrators prefer to discuss a number of major opportunity spaces that may become mutually beneficial to both parties. Either way, NetSuite wins as its product line becomes more competitive, more complete and more cost-effective to sell as channel partners will take an ever greater role in developing the markets and closing deals involving the broadening NetSuite product line.

One of the NetSuite executives in these briefings added that the company develops the roadmap and potential enhancements from listening to the requests of customers and the marketplace. I’m quite familiar with this process as it is one commonly used by many software companies. However, the problem with this approach is that often leads a software company to continue to enhance existing products that it sells to its existing customers at the expense of creating visionary, transformative and amazingly all new products that capture the hearts and minds of the customers to come. Steve Jobs, in my estimation, was absolutely brilliant at that understanding what to put in and what to leave out of products developed by Apple. I seriously doubt that Steve Jobs consulted a list of customer functional enhancements to determine what would eventually go into products that we know today as the iPhone, iPod or iPad. Should NetSuite desire breakthrough product innovations within its partner ecosystem, then it needs a mechanism to create breakthrough innovation not just incremental innovation around the periphery of its product line.

NetSuite executives also expressed a desire to retain the integrity of its core product line. It discourages partners from developing functionality that is redundant with existing functionality within the core processes NetSuite currently supports. They welcome products that extend existing applications, do not serve as functional substitutes or become direct replacements of NetSuite applications. Moreover, they do not want partners to build products that insert themselves in the middle of NetSuite processes unless these insertions yield truly high-value added capabilities for the mutual customer base.

What can we conclude from NetSuite’s partner strategy?

NetSuite appears to be building a very deliberate, not chaotic, partner ecosystem. Rapid product line expansion and functional improvements seemed to be at the top of their priorities. Cross product integration is clearly a management priority.

One group of potential partners was not apparent to me: providers of external data sources that could enrich existing processes. I did see CCH, a provider of tax table maintenance and other data, in the exhibitor hall. But, most of the firms in the exhibition area were clearly selling add-on modules, standalone applications that integrate with NetSuite applications, reporting/analyst tools, HR software, consulting services, etc. Providers of external data were not abundant, in my opinion. That needs to be a thrust for next year’s event.

The quality of the NetSuite partner group continues to improve. Like a fine wine or cheese, the partner community seems to get better with the passage of time. Bigger systems integrators, more channel partners, more complementary technologies, etc. would define the environment I saw at this year’s show.

Big, global systems integrators may provide headlines for NetSuite; however, I was not overly impressed with the degree of actual commitment from these providers. One NetSuite executive pegged the number of Accenture deals involving NetSuite software at approximately 2 dozen. Deloitte is currently working on a similar sized number of deals. Yet, some significantly smaller firms are already pushing deal sizes of 10 or more clients today. This would indicate that large systems integrators may be:

• still moving very slowly away from on-premise work to multi-tenant, cloud application software
• taking a wait-and-see attitude before jumping in with full-blown investments in training and product development around new age products like NetSuite and its NS-BOS platform
• not so nimble or advanced as their marketing might suggest

I would recommend that NetSuite lean hard on its large global integrator partners to see just how committed they really are to the space, to the NetSuite platform, to building out the NetSuite ecosystem and to NetSuite specifically.

Story from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sommer/netsuite-suiteworld-part-2-growth-of-the-platform-ecosystem/1202

NetSuite SuiteWorld Part 3: The Product Enhancements

By Brian Sommer on May 21, 2012

(Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

I attend a lot of software events every year. A lot!

The events that I like the best, and the ones that get customers seemingly jazzed up the most, are events where vendors introduce an amazing quantity and quality of innovation that exceeds the initial expectations of the attendees. Bad conferences, in contrast, usually have a software executive speak about some generic trend in the industry that their firm might get interested in in about a decade or so. And the worst conferences have no new product news. They try to make do with some sort of external motivational speaker who tries to make you feel good without thinking about your non-productive investment in a software product. (I always think of an unfunny version of Chris Farley when he played the guy that lives in a van down by the river….)

I thought one of the highlights of the event was Evan Goldberg’s keynote on Wednesday. He jammed more updates, more news and more things that the crowd wanted to see/hear in a 90-minute segment that most multi-day software confabs don’t get out in a week. He kept my attention throughout.

NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg – copyright 2012 TechVentive, Inc.

Evan started off describing their rather large growth in headcount the last few years. It now is at 400 with many of them involved in R&D activities. In contrast, headcount was ½ that one year ago and ½ again as large 2 years prior.

He also shared statistics involving product quality and testing.

NS Quality Stats – copyright 2012 TechVentive, Inc.

The cynic in me would say they had to do this because of the growing product footprint. The fact that they actually are doing this should be of great comfort to the install base.

The number of enhancement points per release is also up sharply (and that is why they are doing more testing).

NS functionality – copyright 2012 TechVentive, Inc.

Evan broke the major product line changes into four categories: User Experience, Platform, Enterprise and Industries/Verticals. He powered through a lot of updates on each of these four areas. Here are just a few of the areas/highlights he touched on:

• Bulk field updates – the software can now support a bulk update capability for users who need to update a large number of records at once (e.g., a user could select a large subset of customers within the CRM system and apply a consistent data value to each)
• New dashboard charting – new graphics, compound graphics and easier to use capabilities are now available to users
• New User Interface – it’s a cleaner, more modern look

In verticals, Evan showcased a number of enhancements. I’ll let his own slides tell the story:

copyright 2012 – TechVentive, Inc.

copyright 2012 – TechVentive, Inc.

Evan also discussed a number of enhancements to their wholesale distribution functionality. Specifically, he showed new functionality in intelligent order allocation and available to promise.  Likewise, he showed a new dynamic merchandizing capability in their e-commerce solution.  He even showed a “revenue as a service” functional enhancement. The thought here is that as all sorts of firms are shifting more of their revenue from products to services, they’ll need a very flexible way to bill, account, etc. for these monies.

I paid particular attention to a major upgrade they made to their enterprise solution. This involved the ability to maintain several concurrent sets of books for a single transaction globally. This is needed because a U.S. headquartered firm may keep its consolidated books in U.S. GAAP but its subsidiaries may use IFRS or different GAAP methods elsewhere. This new functionality will help firms with tangled revenue recognition and other accounting challenges. This puts NetSuite closer to competing with Workday for cloud accounting deals especially with subsidiaries of conglomerates.

copyright 2012 – TechVentive, Inc.

In the platform area, Evan demonstrated their SuiteCloud IDE tools. These permit faster cleaner development on the NS platform.

copyright 2012 – TechVentive, Inc.

NetSuite needs to bottle this presentation and take it on the road. Evan’s remarks started to have the energy of a DreamForce or CloudForce event. The big difference was the number of product enhancements.

Some of my peer analysts may have felt that some enhancements were overdue or still not sufficient. That may be; however, the sheer volume and velocity displayed at this event show NetSuite becoming a formidable player. Other vendors should envy NetSuite’s R&D capability in doing so much with so few. In a week with so many other vendor conferences, the lack of product news from other vendors was notable.

Story from http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/49139/netsuite-suiteworld-part-3-product-enhancements/

NetSuite SuiteWorld Part 1: The Big Points

By Brian Sommer on May 21, 2012

Last week, NetSuite conducted its annual user conference. The event itself was very well attended, full of positive energy and replete with numerous announcements of new functionality and other items of importance.

The first major headline for me involved CEO Zach Nelson’s announcements regarding a new commerce suite. This collection of functionality is targeted for a large number of retailers, e-tailers and other merchants. Zach repeatedly made the case that a NetSuite solution would provide better integration, fewer interfaces, etc. than competitive solution that are often cobbled together from many disparate products.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson – copyright 2012 TechVentive, Inc.

While many people have or will write of the new commerce functionality, the solution should serve as a signpost for where NetSuite must take its product line in the very near future. Specifically, NetSuite’s large and growing core ERP product line currently maintains large volumes of transaction data for customers. While many of these records are accounting transaction days in nature, the ever expanding product line footprint includes many other ERP records involving inventory movement, product data and other information.

NetSuite Commerce engine – Copyright 2012 TechVentive, Inc.

But as vast as this information within the ERP core product line is, it may pale in comparison to the volumes of transactions that can be generated by a robust commerce product line. Just imagine the quantity of individual order line items a large e-commerce retailer would generate. Imagine the volume of point-of-sale transactions possible from a large brick-and-mortar retailer. Imagine what sort of insights could be found within this data.

It is this mass of information within the commerce and ERP systems that will present the next challenge or opportunity for NetSuite.

Recently, I’ve spoken about the concept of a trifecta. Simply stated, when three or more related technologies come into being at the same time, they have the potential to create massively transformative changes on the business and consumer landscape. The most significant trifecta for the last several years has been that of social, mobile and cloud computing rolled together. This has clearly had a significant impact on the application software world and these three are now impacting virtually every process and workflow of modern businesses. This trifecta is redefining business and business systems today.

In the last couple of years another trifecta has emerged. This one involves big data, analytics and in memory database technology. These three technologies excel when large amounts of internal and external data can be quickly crunched to produce new and economically beneficial insights for businesses.

It is this second trifecta that was notably absent in the discussions by NetSuite executives. Their newest systems (and the volume of transactions these new systems will produce) will certainly try their customers. These customers will expect the new solutions will come with mechanizations to parse and make sense of the new data, external data and more.  These are the opportunities and new capabilities within the second trifecta.

During a press conference, I asked Zach Nelson exactly this question. He asked a customer to speak about how they are using the new insights and information within the NetSuite commerce products. We heard how this customer is using the information to calculate lifetime customer value for their firm. We also heard that partners, like MyDials or systems integrators, will need to create these advanced capabilities.

From what I saw at the event, the new and old systems are producing and using internal transaction data. While this is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable use of information, there are so many other additional sources of external data that the commerce engine should be utilizing to round out a more complete impact of current and potential business outcomes for the customers. For example:

• Could weather data be added to the mix to help retailers forecast their staffing needs at brick-and-mortar locations?
• Could GDP and other economic data be used to better identify placement of retail locations, distribution centers, etc.?
• Should powerful algorithm/modeling/multivariate optimization technology be incorporated in the product line so that the effect of seasonality can be included in stocking, replenishment and pricing decisions?
• Can more powerful cost accounting modules be developed to take into account more precise costing nuances around cubic area of storage space required, detailed picking cost information, etc.?

The announcements at the show were certainly very important in expanding NetSuite’s product footprint and providing direction into the verticals that NetSuite wishes to dominate. Whether NetSuite chooses to continue to provide the advanced business intelligence/analytic modeling that can take these solutions (and by extension the businesses that use these solutions) to greater market success, is the big question for the next year.

http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/49141/netsuite-suiteworld-part-1-big-points/