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'Sage doesn't worry us,' says NetSuite vice president

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7th Dec 2005
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During a recent visit to promote version NetSuite version 10.6, international product vice president Craig Sullivan said he wasn't worried about established UK suppliers like Sage, who are eyeing the opportunities for online accounting and ERP applications.

Sullivan, a British accountant, talked to AccountingWEB about the web-hosted ERP system he has helped develop over the past five-years.

Because NetSuite hosts the application centrally, the product roll-outs are worldwide. But part of his job is to ensure that NetSuite is "not an American product with the spelling fixed", but is able to cater properly for local markets.

Enhancements that have been added to the product in recent months include five new language editions and a customisable tax engine able to handle compliance requirements in different jursidictions as well as the reporting demands of national GAAP and international financial reporting standards (IFRS).

For the UK market, NetSuite has tied up with credit card gateway provider SECpay to allow users to capture data from transactions they conduct on the web through NetSuite's webstore module.

With the software as a service debate ranging around him, Sullivan attempted to differentiate his product set from client/server-oriented rivals.

"Our architecture is designed from the ground up to be a web-based application. It runs on Oracle's database, as you would expect with Larry Ellison's involvement in the company. So it's a single application with multiple roles and mission sets for users to access it," Sullivan explained.

"Short of Oracle and SAP, the only two big ERP vendors remaining, what we have is one of the few applications that spans your entire business workflow."

Role-based user portals are becoming increasingly popular among business software developers, Sullivan noted. Because of the breath of operational features designed into the application, NetSuite had cottoned on to the idea more than five years ago, he said.

"The reason portals are becoming popular is because they're useability heaven. They allow users to get up and running quickly, which reduces training cost. It's no good for a salesperson to log into what looks like an accounting application in terms of workflow or terminology.

"So with NetSuite, a salesperson sees customers, opportunities, leads and sales forecsts that are consistent with the CRM systems they may be used to. A financial guy sees financial information and marketing sees campaign management, customer acqusition stats and so on."

Sullivan argued that providing an integrated online application service demanded more than just hosting existing accounting applications. "You have to think constantly about how various aspects of the business interact and how the software they use to run the business needs to interact to make it success."

NetSuite metaphorically shrugged its shoulders at Sage's intentions to provide a hosted Line 50 service, Sullivan added. "That's kind of trying to teach an old dog new tricks. I agree with Sage that it doesn't matter what you do with those applications. They'll still leave customers dissatisfied whichever way they deliver them.

"It's no good taking an old application and putting it somewhere else. It's not built for the Net and there will be no cost savings for taking that path. It doesn't solve the problems we hear everyday from customers who find those products don't support their workflows.

"What differentiates us from other applications out there is that there is only one set of data. When sales enters a record and converts an opportunity into a quotation, that quote can become a sales order that goes to the warehouse or project manager for fulfilment. The same order can then be converted into invoice and payment records or used by the service branch to with service queries."

Looking ahead, Sullivan said the company's priorities would be to expand the software to cater for vertical industries and to introduce new facilities for distribution and wholesale industries, as well as facilities for software and high-tech companies and professional service organisations.

Revenue recognition was a big issue for software companies and new features were being designed to help, he said. "Making sure you can track combinations of products and services - and there's a lot more of that these days with increasing audit and scrutiny. We have some very capable features for revenue management, forecasting and deferred revenue."

Other highlights of the NetSuite 10.6 release include:

  • New "dashboard-centric" tools using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). AJAX tools make it possible to change data on a website without having to regenerate the entire HTML page. It allows NetSuite users to rag and drop elements to reconfigure their browser-based dashboards on the fly.
  • Form and list handling tools to ake it easier to enter data into the system.
  • Graphical KPI meters and a "rolling average" line that can be easily added to trend graphs
  • Customisation tools to make it easier for companies to tailor the NetSuite user interface to their own needs.
  • Integration tools to link with websites such as Google maps and software including Microsoft Office. For example, NetSuite reports can be transferred to Microsoft Excel for further analysis and be refreshed from the underlying data.
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