Jim McGeever, NetSuite’s top executive, had the silhouette of an elephant flash behind him when he came on stage at NetSuite’s annual SuiteWorld event last week in Las Vegas—the first such event since Oracle acquired the company for $9.3 billion in November.
“If there is one place that I thought we could get an actual, live elephant in the room, it is Vegas,” said McGeever, now executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit. “Turns out, no.”
That pachyderm prohibition didn’t stop McGeever from addressing the real elephant in the room: How would NetSuite change now that it’s part of Oracle?
NetSuite, which provides cloud-based applications that growing companies use to run their businesses, is now a global business unit inside of Oracle, McGeever noted. That means NetSuite, unlike the vast majority of Oracle’s acquisitions, operates as its own business, keeping its own products, developers, support team, salespeople, marketers, and professional services partners.
On a day-to-day basis, “for most of our customers, there’s almost no change whatsoever,” McGeever said. “It’s really been business as usual.”
However, Oracle does provide NetSuite with access to more of the resources it needs to grow: two times more data centers globally, more R&D for new product development, and more collaboration with customers to get them more value from NetSuite. It launched its SuiteSuccess initiative earlier this year that draws on 20 years of industry best practices to deliver NetSuite’s new purpose-built, unified cloud solution tailored for eight industries, with plans to expand to more industries this year.
“We didn’t spend $9.3 billion to disinvest in the business. Quite the opposite,” Oracle CEO Mark Hurd told SuiteWorld attendees. “We spent that money to invest in it to drive it harder, to drive it faster, as part of a grander strategy for Oracle to lead this transformation in the cloud.
Here are five concrete examples of that “more” to expect from NetSuite as part of Oracle:
1. NetSuite will expand globally. NetSuite plans to provide its cloud services from 11 data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, up from five today, by tapping some of Oracle’s data centers.
NetSuite also will tap into Oracle development centers in India, China, and Japan to speed up its development of localized features within its NetSuite OneWorld platform. And it will hire more salespeople, internationally and in the US, as it goes from field offices in 10 countries to 23. NetSuite expects to hire more new people in 2018 than it employed in the entire company in 2012.
2. NetSuite will accelerate its product innovation. At SuiteWorld, the company announced it will offer a complete HR application suite, called SuitePeople, a major new complement to its applications for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), ecommerce, and supply chain management.
Sticking with NetSuite’s strategy, the SuitePeople functionality is an element of the NetSuite core product, not an add-on module. That means a warehouse manager can see the day’s deliveries and the vacation request she must approve in the same interface.
“We’ve always built our applications to run a business, not to run a department, and that’s exactly how we’ve done with this,” McGeever said. SuitePeople also will include Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service for easy drag-and-drop chart analysis.
3. NetSuite will keep its customer focus. The company’s SuiteSuccess solution is a major new initiative to help companies implement NetSuite even faster and at a lower cost, and driving better results. SuiteSuccess pulls together best practices NetSuite has learned about scoping and implementing the platform, and about optimizing performance for specific industries with configurations, metrics, reports, features, and more.
SuiteSuccess is the culmination of a multiyear transformation effort to combine the NetSuite unified suite, 20 years of industry-leading practices, a new customer engagement model, and business optimization methods into a unified, industry cloud solution tailored for each industry. More than 300 customers have SuiteSuccess industry editions, and it is available now for these industries: advertising, media, publishing; financial technology; manufacturing; nonprofit; retail; service-based businesses; software/internet; and wholesale distribution.
4. NetSuite will keep its strong partner network—and integrate Oracle applications. NetSuite’s ecosystem of independent technology partners must adhere to NetSuite’s “Built for NetSuite” integration and support requirements. “You don't just show up and do an integration and walk away,” McGeever said.
Same goes for Oracle applications, McGeever said, though they might be ultra “Built for NetSuite.” NetSuite plans to create integrations for Oracle Planning and Budgeting, Oracle Analytics, and Oracle Talent Management cloud services. Hurd said he expects Oracle applications will be able to do “deeper and quicker NetSuite integrations,” even as NetSuite’s partner ecosystem continues to thrive.
5. NetSuite will continue pursuing a range of fast-growing companies as customers. Hurd made clear he’s not interested in creating a “bright red line” that says certain customer sizes or types should go with NetSuite and others should be directed to Oracle ERP, HR, and other cloud applications.
Broadly speaking, NetSuite’s cloud applications have appealed to fast-growing small and midsize companies. Oracle Cloud applications tend to be adopted by larger enterprises. But it’s common for a large enterprise’s subsidiaries to use NetSuite, and for fast-growing companies to stay on NetSuite as they go from startup to larger publicly traded company.
On day two of SuiteWorld, Evan Goldberg, NetSuite’s cofounder and executive vice president of development, spent two hours showing off NetSuite’s capabilities, including a deep dive into SuitePeople, new industry-focused functions and reporting tools, and new services for retailing, manufacturing, professional services management, and more.
Goldberg left the NetSuite community with a simple message: “Oracle plus NetSuite means more, more, more.”
Chris Murphy is director of cloud content at Oracle.
