SuiteWorld 2017
It’s always a blast getting to visit Las Vegas for a week and call it work. Yes, we got to rock out with Courtney Love and Stone Temple Pilots. Yes, there was sunshine, and really nice dinners (with cocktails). But there was also lots of running between conferences and catching up with old friends. And there were some key take-aways from Las Vegas this year at Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld 2017.
The headlines are:
SuitePeople
SuiteSuccess
SuiteCommerce Standard
World Domination
World Domination
Let’s deal with the last one first. Oracle NetSuite are planning a massive global expansion to accelerate growth. This includes launching more data centres, creating more offices around the world (they are already in over 10 countries) and rolling out more partners to expand their global footprint.
Much of the development is to show customers how Oracle’s weight and might will have an impact upon their latest acquisition of the NetSuite cloud based ERP product. Oracle already have a tremendous wealth of global resources. Adding to their existing data centres (in America, Ireland and Holland) will be a fourth American data centre, one in Frankfurt, Singapore, Australia, Japan and China. This unprecedented level of investment only serves to show the cloud ERP market that Oracle are serious about their investment in NetSuite.
Similarly NetSuite will open offices in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, France, Germany, Sweden, Dubai, China, India, Malaysia and New Zealand (*and breathe*). From a partner perspective, they are really focusing on rolling out across the Nordics. VAR Partners Alterview have had the pleasure of NetSuite exclusivity for some time in that space.
SuitePeople
Something notably absent from the NetSuite offering, for some time, has been function rich HR modules. Without doubt, it is the only piece of NetSuite which has been consistently missing, despite it typically appearing as a pre-requisite on customer RFIs. Sure, NetSuite had purchased Tribe HR some time ago, but it had shortcomings – most notably that it wasn’t native to the NetSuite platform. Meanwhile the gap has been filled by Cloud Tamer’s HR for NetSuite module. Nick and Rebecca Eden had early on identified the requirement for a robust HR solution and have been able to sell their module as an extension of NetSuite for quite some time. We have had cause to lean on Cloud Tamers ourselves for this over the years. The partners have been aware that HR functionality was on the road map but it has been sadly missing from updates for a number of years. That is why it is so exciting to hear that the new core HR offering SuitePeople will be built natively on NetSuite’s cloud platform. Don’t get me wrong, HR is traditionally absent from an ERP offering, but that’s what makes it all the more exciting.
SuitePeople will have:
- Core HR Capabilities – company design, job and position management, workflows, master data
- HR Analytics – pre-built dashboards for key roles
- Employee Engagement – helping to identify key employees through employee recognition
- HR Compliance – built in reports, searches and notifications to ensure regulatory requirements
- Unified Access – across multiple divisions from HR to Finance to Shop Floor
- Global – Links with OneWorld supporting 20 languages and 190 currencies, automated tax calculations and reporting in over 100 countries
Effectively this is a unified industry “edition” of NetSuite. A dozen or so of these have been completed already, including for advertising, media & publishing, financial technology, not for profit, retail, software, wholesale distribution and service businesses. It’s NetSuite’s attempt to combine multiple years of experience implementing into multiple business types, with learned best practice. SuiteSuccess then becomes a standardised customer engagement model which improves deployment and has rapid time to value. The benefit is that companies can grow, scale, adapt to change much faster than before.
NetSuite has always had great out-the-box functionality. And it has always had industry verticals. But it hasn’t really combined the two in this kind of “micro-industry-vertical” type fashion.
SuiteCommerce Standard
Not much to say on this one, other than NetSuite have bridged the gap between their SiteBuilder (basic functionality e-commerce) and SuiteCommerce Advanced (all singing all dancing, omni-channel retail software) by launching SuiteCommerce Standard. It promises to be quick and easy to deploy and configure. It will be an easy to manage site software with responsive and flexible design. Customisations will be managed through a combinations of plugins and a modern architecture. We already have a number of customers who will be delighted by this functionality roll out.
All in all it was a very worthwhile trip. We flew out with our customer Actavo, and we got to hang out with our partners like iCharts and Celigo, not to mention a great lunch with NetSuite Sales Star Supreme Sara Goosens.
My only regret is that I didn’t find the time to do SlotZilla.
Paul Tindal is founder of Cofficient – one of NetSuite’s longest standing UK partners.
Cofficient Ltd has been implementing NetSuite in the UK for over 13 years. To find out more about NetSuite please get in touch
