The best way to learn about new trends is to simply ask people about them! Everytime I meet someone, I try to ask their predictions or future outlook, when something comes up regularly I do the sensible thing and quickly google it so I can look smarter in my next conversation!
One topic that has come up a bit recently is Netsuite and it’s impact on Oracle products in Ireland. I’m sure that the sales reps may have called you and told you all about it but if not then will go through the basics here with a short opinion here. Save you googling next time after a meeting!
Netsuite is an ERP (enterprise resource planning) product, similar to Oracle Ebusiness, it was bought by Oracle and incorporated into the family on the 7th of November 2016. Interestingly it was founded by a former Oracle employee and Larry Ellison actually owned 40% before the sale, they had to have independent committees checking as there was such a conflict of interests between Oracle and Netsuite.
Largely seen in 1999 as the first cloud computing company founded (1 month before Salesforce), it has the USP that it is software that combines ERP, CRM and ecommerce and runs it all together, helping manage your back office. In my view though, this is a standard sell across the industry so hard to see the true meaning of it. Also lifted this interesting quote out of an article about the ERP market size, scope and potential for cloud worldwide
“Analysts are predicting untold riches in enterprise cloud and ERP-as-a-Service, thanks to the underlying switch from buying on-prem licences. IDC reckons the enterprise SaaS market will be worth $23.8bn by 2018, a CAGR of 17 per cent from 2013. Forester calculates SaaS ERP is growing annually at 25 per cent just as on-prem is declining. Currently, SaaS ERP is less than 10 per cent of the $45bn ERP market.”
Oracle knows which way the wind is blowing as it messed up it’s cloud strategy many years ago, claiming that it would never work and ignoring the other innovators in the industry. Now it seems an Oracle product is hardly launched without cramming Cloud somewhere into the title. At least they have learnt from their mistakes and tried to rectify quickly.
Netsuite has been loss making since inception as is normal with business software and is seen by some as a complimentary market to Oracle EBS (great PR campaign by Oracle!). Netsuite target market is SMB (small and medium size business) where Oracle and SAP target the enterprise level market. A move by Netsuite before the sale was to move the product upwards and aim for the enterprise market, as shown by their pricing and sales strategies. My own view would be that Oracle bought Netsuite as a defensive move to protect their own market and try to compete with new entrants such as Salesforce.
As Oracle has now integrated other legacy purchases into the next upgrade of “Oracle Cloud”, there is reason to believe that Netsuite and it’s functionality will be added in the future. It wouldn’t make sense to invest money into 2 largely similar offerings (of Oracle EBS and Nestuite) when you can sell 1 product to the 2 sets of customers. My opinion is what Oracle really wanted to buy was the market reach, a new brand and new bunch of potential upsells and cross-sells e.g. selling Oracle database products to these ERP users. All a nice easy fit to fill out the client database.
In Ireland there was minimal companies using Netsuite as the market is ruled by the big 3 of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics. Netsuite reps may contact smaller accounts who are “Oracle resistant” and try to use Netsuite as way to start a conversation then work in the pitch Oracle products. You will also see their products at the annual Oracle open day in November and they will talk about the features and benefits, honestly don’t see anything unique about it other than ease of use and price but that may be important for some businesses.
Hope you learnt something, any questions or opinions, please share in the comments section and will answer. If you enjoyed the article send it someone to save them googling Netsuite the next time they hear about it!
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