I was struck by a small gesture by Mark Hurd of Oracle as he presented at the SuiteWorld event. He got off the stage and came to the level of the audience and talked about NetSuite’s importance to Oracle and Exadata. It came across humble whether intentional or not. Later in the evening Larry Ellison opened up his Pacific Heights residence for NetSuite to entertain a few of us. He happens to be a major NetSuite investor but again he need not have done that.
Somehow (probably naive of me) I hope they believe NetSuite has the better, going-forward version of Applications Unlimited that CEO Zach Nelson talked about in his keynote than Oracle does.
Oracle’s version, introduced a few years ago, was about keeping support going on acquired applications – a feel-good olive branch to PeopleSoft, Siebel, JDE customers so they could keep writing high-margin, maintenance checks.
While pricing is still tied to user metrics and modules NetSuite’s is a buffet across many dimensions (see Zach’s slide below), not just time. It gives companies a far better handle on the total cost of those modules – including storage, apps management, upgrades etc- and much better economics than Oracle, SAP or other on-premise ERP vendors can come close to.
It is aimed at larger and more geographically diverse customers than NetSuite has focused on in past. It is part of the multi-tier ERP market NetSuite is increasingly focused on. Groupon presented at the conference on their 29 country rollout in under 3 months.
But beyond a handle on TCO, CTO Evan Goldberg’s presentation this morning showed NetSuite’s growing buffet – with partner applications like supply chain execution from eBizNet, Google Apps integration from Celigo, social tools like QonText (yesterday Zach had also introduced activity streams with Yammer), SuitePhone mobile extensions, better analytics etc.
At Larry’s last night, NetSuite served celebrity chef Michael Mina’s creations. With my dietary restrictions I only tried 3-4 items on the menu. But, man did I salivate at the unlimited buffet Zach and Evan served up on the main stage.
