Take a Shot – Win a Book

Published February 26, 2012 | By Tom

We Missed Carnival By a Week, But You Can Still Play to Win

take a shot for a free copy of NetSuite OneWorld Implementation

If you are thinking about a NetSuite implementation in the near future, or if your firm is currently knocking around the idea of adding a NetSuite practice, then make a comment below or retweet the tweet of this post for a free copy of NetSuite OneWorld Implementation.

The book has received exellent reviews thus far and all of them have noted that it contains excellent guidance about the NetSuite OneWorld implementation process. There is also a ton of good information about NetSuite functionality for those of you who want to know if NetSuite fits the bill for your company's business management system.

So take a little chance. Retweet the tweet of this post or post a comment below and we will choose several among you to receive a free copy.

Good luck and thanks for playing!

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NetSuite OneWorld Implementation Released!

Published December 28, 2011 | By Tom

The NetSuite Implementation Book is Published

NetSuite OneWorld Implementation Book

Nearly 400 pages of NetSuite, from basic questions of what you need to know about NetSuite's place in the ERP/CRM market, to how to get started with the account setup, and details about how to setup specific business models work in OneWorld; I packed a lot into these 400 pages. I'm glad I wrote it and, frankly, I'm glad it's done. I think it will add some value to the NetSuite 'Economy', at least that's my hope. As the first integrated SaaS suite, or actually the only integrated SaaS suite, NetSuite deserves a wide audience. What Evan Goldberg and his development crew have accomplished is truly amazing in my view, and I hope my 400 pages help to tell the story to prospective clients and move the ball down the field a bit. Couple of first downs – I'd be happy. 

I'll say this: My nights and weekends are free again. Time for family, house projects – the list is longer than normal, my old hobbies. What were those again? If you're interested in seeing the TOC and learning more about the book, there are several pages devoted to the book at the publisher's, Packt Publishing, website. Start here: http://www.packtpub.com/netsuite-oneworld-implementation-2011-r2/book. There is also a sample chapter. 

I have also setup a website for the book – http://www.owimplementation.com. If you have questions or comments about the book I welcome them and will do my best to stay on top of your queries. If anything in the book confuses please let me know and I will do my best to make a better explanation. 

The book is also available now on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/NetSuite-OneWorld-Implementation-2011-R2/dp/1849681325/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1325128417&sr=8-2. An electronic version is also available for you kindle or i-pad.

The audience for the book includes any business person currently thinking about NetSuite as their business management system, anyone currently implementing or using NetSuite who wants to exploit all of its functionality, and anyone who is going to be part of a NetSuite project, whether you are an in-house resource or a third party consultant. 

Interested in NetSuite to run your business?

It makes sense to take a deep dive on NetSuite or NetSuite OneWorld before you sign a contract. It's a big commitment and and it's hard to find a resource that provides both the detail and the broad overview that you need. This book has both. It explains NetSuite in the context of both software as a service and the integrated suite for business management. It also provides a lot of important details about setting up your account and configuring the modules you need, by business model. 

Running a NetSuite Implementation? Planning to Join One?

If a NetSuite implementation is in your future then you really should take a look at this book.  How do you structure a software as a service implementation? What's the best way to analyze the business, fit it to NetSuite, configure and prototype, test, convert and customize. The detail to help you understand matters small and large is here, focused by our experience with over 60 full life cycle implementations.

Do you already have NetSuite?

And want to exploit more of its functionality for your business? Or are you an IT pro who wants to make the switch to the cloud and is need a detailed book on NetSuite? This book will help to focus your account and give you a lot of ideas about how to use the NetSuite system to help the business. 

 

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AisleBuyer: At the Intersection of Consumer and Enterprise Technology

Published October 13, 2011 | By Tom

Where Many Goliaths Have Failed, A David Comes Forward

Thinking about it now, the David and Goliath metaphor may not work perfectly, but it does quickly focus this post. The enterprise world has spent untold billions of treasure on customer relationship management over the past two decades, and you have to ask to what avail? For the business to business organizations, one understands giving sales and channel partners a solution. But for retailers, the value of CRM has been difficult to ascertain. E-commerce might be slightly better because you have transaction record with an identity. But getting to really know your customers, to the point where you have something approaching a relationship, has been the proverbial mirage of retail, and CRM generally. We have the little keychain ID cards for the local grocery stores, but have not yet received a personalized alert that the groceries we tend to buy seasonally have gone on sale, or that this group of items is available at a discount. You would think that after three or four years they would know us better. 

AisleBuyer is out to change all that. By offering consumers an easy to use tool to shop, research in store, review promotions, order and checkout and by offering retailers a rules based marketing platform integrated with their back office inventory and the other systems, AisleBuyer bridges the divide between the customer and the 'store'; it's real time CRM initiated by the customer for the customer's benefit. (There's a novel concept.)

Loaded onto thousands of servers the world over are massive CRM systems that try to make heads or tails of customer behavior after the fact, when the customer has long since checked out and driven home, maybe even moved to another city. But for all the data, the information is sparse. AisleBuyer not only lets you see real time what the individual shopper scans and buys, but what they scanned and did not buy. For example, if they scan a sweatshirt in medium but put it down, and inventory in large is unavailable in the store, AisleBuyer can alert you that other sizes are available and let you place the order right on your phone. 

Shoppers can now research the products they are interested in while in the aisle and holding them, simply by using the AisleBuyer app and their smartphone's camera/scanner. And when a retailer's rules sense that you are interested in a clock radio, they can dial up a promo on the spot. When you make your selection, you add the item to your cart, literal and virtual, and move on. When you are done shopping, you checkout and pay online. No more put it in the cart, remove it from the cart and put it back in the cart. When you are done shopping, you checkout as you stroll to the door, where you show a store clerk your smartphone order. 

Retailers, manufacturers and consumers all have their own good reasons to use a service like AisleBuyer: The ability to connect with your customer real time for the retailer; a data store for the manufacturer; and true convenience for the shopper. 

The technology landscape is littered with the wreckage of large tech companies who tried a consumer offensive, as detailed in this NYT article, where consumer world is referred to bleakly as the "Afghanistan" of enterprise technology. So what makes AisleBuyer different. In a word it's simplicity. The user interface of the smartphone app is simple and straightforward. All the complexity is hidden behind the scenes where AisleBuyer's web APIs integrate volumes of data with retailer's back office systems and the their own marketing platform. 

While large tech companies would do well to tread lightly in the consumer space, large retailers have some quick decision making at hand. The adoption of smart phones is changing the way we communicate, compute and live; and the rate of adoption has accelerated so fast recently that many retailers were caught off guard – they did not budget in 2011 for mobile shopping. At this point they can try to build it themselves or they can use a service like AisleBuyer – in either an on-demand version, or on premise if the retailer insists. 

AisleBuyer does more than just mobilize the store and give retailers a strategy to compete with e-commerce, it also arms store personnel with an app that gives them the ability  to be real value add to the customer. The clerk app offers a veritable knowledge base of information on products. Imagine a harried clerk being able to stop and answer your question right in the aisle without using the obnoxious store wide loudspeaker phone. Your shoppers might actually ask a question that leads to a sale. 

System complexity is often the result of trying to mirror human behaviour and its off the charts idiosyncrasies. But what if you don't try mirror behavior but simply capture it as it happens. How does that change the enterprise CRM game? Instead of waiting for customers to line up and walk through our predefined corn maize, you let the customer behave and you simply respond as a fascinated, helpful third party.

We, or at least I, have long questioned whether our systems were off on a tangent, trying desperately to keep up with a marketplace that cares nothing for processes or transaction conformity. Sometime in this business, as in life, we don't actually answer the question, so much as the questions become moot and we move along to, inevitably, new questions. If you accept the premise that AisleBuyer is an enterprise CRM system, and I do, then the next step is to ask is does it provide a new question about how CRM is going to operate in the future: Customer driven, customer focused, process and transaction lite? Where does that leave the massive CRM systems we have struggled under these many years?

The other question you can't help but ask is how a service like AisleBuyer ramps up in the market. Large retailers might each bring it on-premise and then go through the typical heavy lifting of sourcing infrastructure, laying pipe, etc. Each install will be different because each retailer has a custom back end integration project; but the big boys have full wallets, or so I hear in the press. On the other end of the sprectrum small retail chains could swap out AisleBuyer for a majority of their POS terminals. And if AisleBuyer was already integrated with a SaaS back end, say NetSuite or Business By Design, all mutual customers could avail themselves of the magic without having separate integration projects. Just another huge benefit of the SaaS model. 

 

 

 

 

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SaaS ERP Migration: Question Is Not When But How?

Published September 20, 2011 | By Tom

One of my linkedIn groups is having a discussion about the mass migration to ‘Cloud’ ERP. There have been several good posts that covered everything from control, licensing, security, definition of cloud, etc. It’s the sort of discussion that the EI’s used to have a few years back on a regular basis. We were probably a little early, and the topic is certainly ripe for more robust discussion today.

Unless of course they have already been through the best of breed skirmishes of earlier corporate IT visions. If their career stretches back to the 80′s, boy I’m really dating myself now, they will look at the series of bridges they need to take one at a time and wonder if they lead anywhere useful and promising. What’s the final destination? Confusion? Spaghetti code that no one understands? Wasted resources running in circles trying to find the cause of a problem that might be in one of four systems, or worse the code that connects them? It’s not an inspiring vision.

The newly minted corporate leader doesn’t have any of the old, jagged scars from the best of breed era. They show up at Dreamforce 2011 and it never occurs to them that while the CRM may be robust, the connections to the rest of the their organization’s systems are as fragile and fraught with issues as ever. If you stretch out your IT resources that far to link disparate systems, will the line hold? For how long?

The question that must be asked is “What’s another way to win here?” Not yet possessing the will to go all in for the whole organization, and with vague memories of the IT department broken into tribes – each devoted to their own application, the experienced leader trains the eye on a division, a smaller unit where you can place a big important bet and watch how it works up close and in detail. This is a wise move. Instead of fighting the last IT war of best of breed giving way to the integrated suite, start with the victor and move forward. The integrated suite won, let’s be honest. But the on-premise suite does have a price: It’s complex and difficult to install and implement. It also carries large annual maintenance fees, and the talent you need to acquire in order to keep it operational is significant.

Now the question becomes “Is SaaS a better way to run the company on a suite?” The best way to find out may be to implement it for a division and monitor the process closely. Some of the question you’ll want answered: How long to implement? How wide was the gap between our process requirements and the delivered suite? Were we able to customize and plug the gap? How did employee training go? Was the UI intuitive? Do the departments communicate well in the suite, like sales to operations and operations to finance? Does it provide the metrics we need to understand and control our business? If we need to link it to another app, is it possible? Is it open to vendors, customers, partners, other employee users outside the mainstream heavy users? Does it make sense financially?

You can guess at all of the questions, or a highly paid software analyst can guess for you, but you probably did not come to your current position because you ignore or avoid risk. You learned to manage risk, and using a division to prove the SaaS suite, one way or the other, is an excellent risk stategy.

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Does Social Add Complexity or Replace It?

Published September 6, 2011 | By Tom

Listening last week to salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote address at DreamForce 2011, I started to see social and enterprise apps come together in a more meaningful integration than I had seen before.

Suffice it to say that a lot of enterprise software analsysts have been very cool to the idea of the social enterprise. This is unfortunate because it suggests a lot of confusion on all sides. The advocates of social sometimes seem to beat a drum about either the tools of social networking or they have a quasi political slant. In either case, the effort to muddle through to some reasonable view seems too great and people throw their hands up and say, Non Mas. I can’t blame them.

In fact the keynote address had some elements of this, as well. The social contact is an idea in a lot of CRM systems offer now, and there’s nothing particulary wrong with it, but I doubt it adds a lot of value. I can only imagine what a company looking at my social profile might determine from the wisecracks I make to nephews and siblings on Facebook, or the rather mundane tech slant of my Twitter account. LinkedIn might be slightly more interesting in a high stakes B2B sale, but hardly worth the effort.

When we move from the social contact to the social employee, though, the view finally starts to clear up. We begin to see the outlines of something damned interesting.  The SF tool, Chatter, has been considerably improved and SF has started to learn how their customers want to use it. (By the way, you have to give them, sf.com, a lot of credit for taking this ‘learn by experience’ route as there are a lot of software companies their size or larger that would never have the courage to admit in public that they don’t have all the answers. Witness the current melodrama playing out at HP. Ugh.)

The result of their learning and experimentation is a social tool with the potential to make the user’s company and processes better over time, and to make the software better as well. I guess I’m taking a bit of a leap here, but after a lifetime of watching software’s futile attempt to model our ungovernable lives, I have a real soft spot for a ‘simple’ little tool like Chatter that can help us manage the 20% of transactions that somehow veer away from the prosaic norm.

Think about the small manufacturing company that makes 5 assemblies from 200 items or subassemblies, each of which can be purchased from at least two vendors. What’s the problem, right? Well, normally it’s not a big deal, but there’s a little bump in sales and a lost purchase order and now you’re scrambling to get orders out. If you have BIG ERP there are ways of altering the manufacturing plan. Will take months to setup, train and then days to perform, but it can be done. But with Chatter, these types of snafus are remediated through a collaboration of your operations manager, your vendors and your sales manager. People spend their time solving problems, not working the software plan. You can see that you don’t have to have nearly the same amount of complexity in your ERP system, when you depend on collaboration to solve the one offs, instead of layering solutions in the software code.

On the other hand, a lot of Chatter can driver users nuts, but hopefully we’ll get to the point where we have the right people working to solve the right problem with just the chatter it requires, and little more. There may be hope for enterprise software yet.

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Google Adwords and SEO: Beware of the Fraudsters

Published August 29, 2011 | By Tom

Most of you probably already know this, but I thought it worth mentioning here that SEO fraud appears to be increasing rapidly, along with Google Adwords fraud.

Businesses across the spectrum are anxious, to say the least, to increase business. This might be one reason that the amount of daily calls, emails and other detritus of SEO fraud that crosses my desk everyday increases exponentially. Also, someone must be making money off this scam to have it explode in popularity so quickly. Essentially, all these SEO pitches say that the fraudsters have found the secret formula and can help you improve your page rankings on Google search.

First, the ‘success’ of SEO fraud speaks directly to the fact that a lot of people think that improving your rank on Google search pages is a black and mysterious art. It’s not. You must simply work hard at creating content that other people find interesting and link to. But when you tell people that content is the key, they look at you like you’re a high school English teacher asking for a three page essay due the day after prom. Believe me, it’s worse than that. Content is a three page essay once or twice a week if you really care about search rankings. It also means spending time reading and understanding the subject matter. You have to make yourself part of a larger discussion, and you have to add something meaningful to the discussion.

We still run into people who think they can increase their page rank by hiding keywords in the white areas of their site. This does not work. At least not anymore. Back when we used Alta Vista search this was a common practice, judging by the weird search results we used to get. Google owes the value of their franchise to the fact that they eliminated this nonsense. They created algorithms that allowed us to find “relevant” search results. Relevant is obviously a very rare commodity on the web, judging by the money Google makes. They could also help their cause by making it more obvious how they are search your web pages. They have done some of this the last few years, but as long as legitimate marketing agencies can say, with some honesty, that they have figured out what the Google crawlers are looking for, SEO is going to have a fraudulent underbelly.

By the way, if you want to learn more about SEO fraud and what specifically to watch out for, just Google it.

If you have a NetSuite website, or are in the middle of implementing NetSuite, you should really take the time to understand the SEO attributes before you start setting up the hierarchy, or importing your items. There are several fields that are very important for SEO in the system and it makes sense to understand them well before you have too much setup. Take notice of URL components, page titles, meta tags and your sitemap.

Ultimately, the SEO fraud will spread to other areas of Google’s franchise. There now appears to be a fraudulent Adwords practice surfacing. These come in two flavors. First there are groups that pay people in the third world to click on Adsense and Adwords ads; or they may use a machine. So I guess there are people in internet cafes just clicking all day on ads on those dummy sites. The owner of the site gets a small cut when Google charges the ad owner.

The other fraud is similar to the SEO fraud, wherein the fraudster makes a pitch that they can increase your PPC traffic and conversions because they have the best copywriters, the best knowledge of Adwords, etc. Obviously, you must be very careful when giving someone access to your Adwords account, because once they are in it they can setup campaigns that cost you thousands while netting them hundreds, or even thousands. Since Adwords has your credit card, this can be a very dangerous situation.

Obviously we all need to be better buyers of services, but the marketing industry also bears some responsibility here. SEO should be part of your typical web design and development practice, not a black art that you pitch to prospects. As long as legitimate marketing agencies try to make a buck on the SEO, the marketplace will be full of the plain old fraudsters.

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Software Atomization

Published July 26, 2011 | By Tom

The first best of breed software that we helped to replace was Cullinet’s A/P system. It was 15 years ago, a number hard to believe even as I type it. The company was a Fortune 500 goliath with an enormous IT department. Their goal was to eliminate a slew of legacy applications in favor of the integrated Oracle Suite. So how did it go?

Well, we were able to replace A/P, G/L and the whole Human Resource Management System, including Payroll. However, when it came to the Order Management, Billing and A/R systems Oracle fell on its face, frankly. And when it came to running the parent’s many overseas subsidiaries it was a ‘one and never again’ proposition. After the Netherlands office of 25 users went live after almost a year of effort, the parent pulled back, and with good reason.

Just to put the whole experience into some perspective, about half way through the project, Oracle released the first klugy version of the 10.7 three tier architecture in which the application rendered in a sort of browser window. This eliminated the need for patches to be installed at the client and the server. We thought it was cool. But Oracle’s main marketing strategy at that time was the integrated suite on the universal database. The goal was to run a global company on a single database with a single instance of the integrated applications. Your entire business management software from a single company. Not many people thought it was possible. Fewer thought it was wise.

So now here we are in 2011 and the software landscape has changed tremendously. SAP and Oracle are now the legacy apps.  Most of the on-premise application vendors have been consolidated under a few large corporate flags because consolidation is what happens when growth come to a screeching halt. The real growth is in software as a service, SaaS. We hear a lot about the cloud, social and mobile as well.

Yet, there are still a lot of voices talking about the integrated suite. That this is still a topic of discussion is interesting. You would have thought that the point had been settled a while ago. Who wants to manage several different applications and try to marry them together into a coherent picture of the company. Well, apparently a lot of people do, because there are a lot of new SaaS vendors in the world and many of them offer applications for a very narrow market.

As an example, there are a couple of companies that offer subscription billing services to companies that sell a monthly service. NetSuite offers it’s own subscription billing module, but the fact that there are two major, and several minor, players in this market tells us that best of breed is not going away any time soon. In fact, BoB seems to be making a resurgence. But why?

There are a lot of reasons for this. One important one is that business models are diverse and are probably becoming more so in today’s marketplace. Companies look everywhere for competitive advantage, and they only find the depth of functionality they need to manage their advantages in best of breed.

Another important reason is that SaaS has opened up the software market in amazing new ways. Developing in the cloud means that there are recognized standards that developers follow, like web services for integration, and there are also now web native software integration services.

But perhaps the most important development in software is that companies are starting to realize that they need to be more agile and more flexible in their business models than ever, and their mission critical software also needs to reflect the same values. When, not if, you combine social and mobile with your agile business model in selling, procuring, marketing and operations, you have to have applications that reach further than the accounting centric applications of today. You have to be able to add new functionality quickly. You can’t wait for mobile selling, or mobile warehouse management, or mobile A/P.

In a recent post on www.softwareadvice.com, several voices reiterated their support for the integrated suite. We continue to take their point. There is value in the suite, undoubtedly. Michael Fauscette opines that best of breed might yet have a life:

“The things that are next to your customer, that are integral to your business model or that bring you closer to partners, those applications should be best of breed,” says Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President at IDC. “I think those are types of applications that companies are willing to invest in more.”

We also take this point. Like the subscription billing systems we mentioned above, there are some applications where you must have a depth of functionality that only a best of breed offers. But the question then becomes where can you afford to have generic functionality? A/P is often mentioned as one of those systems where you don’t need a lot of specialized functionality. However, there are a number of SaaS offerings for all manner of A/P, from simple employee and contractor expenses to more complex procure to pay systems. Evidently, there are companies out there that need very specialized functionality.

Even NetSuite, for all of their allegiance to the integrated suite in both word and deed, has validated the best of breed approach in some of their moves. They purchased best of breed professional services management software  from OpenAir and hooked it with their financials; they also offer an integration with salesforce.com.

When Oracle was making the case for the integrated apps one of its main arguments was that you could not manage by real metrics if the company’s data was spread across a wide range of applications. Who can argue with that? But the question today is not whether managers have all the data they need to make decisions but whether they have the time to sit back and reflect on the past in order to take the next step forward. Is this a luxury that today’s company can afford?

Microsoft is a company that manages growth quite well. Revenue, earnings are pretty predictable, and boring. MS has fallen off the scales when it comes to innovation. Apple on the other hand creates growth and moves forward by leaps and bounds. I’m sure that Apple has plenty of data metrics, too. But innovation in any market means moving into unknown territory where there are no metrics. This is what all true growth companies must do, and you have to wonder how much value an integrated view of the company really offers them.

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Breaking Under the Weight of Complexity

Published June 30, 2011 | By Tom

Does information technology need to be so complex?

To answer the first question we must ask another:  What drives complexity?

Vendors tell you that they respond to customers, and it’s true that many customers demand that software meets their highly idiosyncratic requirements, that’s true, and requirements drive complexity. But is it also true that vendors for many reasons welcome their customer’s desire for more complexity, even encourage it. But why?Your systems?

Would the question be easier to answer if we replace ‘vendor’ with ‘employees working under the same flag’? You probably see where I am going with this. The way many employees think about their employment reminds me of the story about economist Milton Friedman who was taken to see a government construction project in a third world country. Why, Friedman wondered, are the men digging a canal with shovels instead of earth moving equipment? He was told that using shovels created more jobs, to which Friedman replied, “Then why not use spoons?”

Many employees who work under the same flag understand that adding complexity is in fact the equivalent of digging a canal with spoons. But, you might ask, management exists to make sure that employees don’t put their own needs before the customer’s, right? Well, management also understands that complexity helps to increase their software’s economy. As complexity grows, professionals and experts show up to help manage it. The more professionals and experts who show up the more cachet the software wins in the marketplace.

Complexity is also a prime driver of customer tie in. After you spend 10 times the license fee to implement SAP or Oracle applications, the probability of your changing applications in the mid-term, or even long term, future approaches zero. Or consider desktop office applications. You not only purchased the licenses but then you trained several hundred or several thousand users. The probability you are going to move to free OpenOffice applications much less on-demand versions of spreadsheet or word processing apps is nearly nil. By the way, have you seen anyone providing training for the free OpenOffice apps? Some probably exist, but you don’t see them around very often.

Recently Microsoft started offering its office apps online, calling it Office 365. I’m not sure how many users they will find for their service, but they have provided plenty of material for the blogosphere. So far, commentators who have tried the service, or tried signing up for it, have a single word to describe the experience – ‘complexity’.

The thing that stood out to me as I read the articles is that the business thinking that motivates so much of what Microsoft does sits in the middle of Office 365. They tied in as many of their applications as possible, for example. Outlook you can understand, but Silverlight? They are also offering a complex pricing plan that encourages users to sign up now for as much of the service as they can afford, since if you decide to change later you cannot migrate your documents.

With the complexity of the interface and the difficulty of installing and using it, it’s only a matter of time before there are training courses devoted to Office 365. You can see legions of corporate users marching into training centers eventually.

Meanwhile I have also caught up on reading some of my favorite online writers, and one of them, Brian Sommers wrote a great article about SAP and Workday; the old on premise ERP giant SAP vs the young SaaS Workday. The question Sommers asks is do legacy ERP vendors have what it takes to build applications for the future requirements of business? It’s one thing to address social, cloud and mobility; these are important notes Sommers. But perhaps even more important Sommers states:

The big changes that businesses are facing are centered around: extraordinarily rapid, curvilinear innovation and changes impacting regulation, competition, finance, etc. The speed of business is not just increasing; it is growing at a skyrocketing pace while the ability of ERP solutions to change is approaching an asymptotic path. The gap between the speed of business and the speed of ERP is expanding not contracting at many firms.

Our question here is do legacy ERP vendors have the ability to innovate in their core apps, or are they outmatched by the complexity they have built in over time. Go back to mobility for a moment. NetSuite order management module is fairly straightforward, and putting an app on a tablet or phone that allows for order entry is a challenge, but one that has already been met. Putting Oracle’s order management system on a phone and making it usable for a saleperson is an order of magnitude more difficult. It can be done, but it’s complex, and takes a lot of cash and time.

In another good read we came across Bob Warfield’s post on a new payment service for mobile called Square. They just raised 100 million in venture capital. This is where the economy is growing and going in many ways. How long will it take NetSuite to integrate Square? Will SAP or Oracle even bother?

We have heard more than once that SaaS software is not ready for the big leagues, that it cannot manage the complexity of real business. Our question is can complex legacy software meet the exigencies of their client’s marketplace today? Or is legacy code buried under a mass of complexity and tangled spaghetti that prevents the old on-premise ERP vendors from quickly adapting to the market’s requirements? The key to survival is not the rote hunting of the slowest mammals, but adaptation. Only those who are able to adapt to a changing environment are going to make it, and adaptation requires quickness, agility, flexibility – all attributes that are the antithesis of complexity.

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SuiteWorld: Day 2

Published May 12, 2011 | By Tom

Let’s start with the best and work our way down:

  • The Google Apps integration was very cool. It reminded me of a demo I saw last year of Appirio’s integration with sf.com. Both use Google gadgets, but Celigo’s integration between google and NetSuite goes much further; it’s a two way integration. You can see busy sales people on a smartphone or pad being able to manage their customer portfolio without having to boot NetSuite directly. Inventive, innovative and nice UI. Celigo really took care of the details on this and rightfully deserved being name Developer of the Year by NetSuite. The integration also includes calendaring. Now, we just need to get more NetSuite clients using gmail and other googleapps!
  • eBizNet’s warehouse management solution was awesome. This is the kind of first rate development on the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform that we have been waiting for. It’s one thing to interface NetSuite to outside third party apps, this is necessary and useful – see the google apps integration above – but when you can develop on top of NetSuite using the platform you have genuine integration. This is also the case for RootStock, the manufacturing app that they developed on SuiteCloud. In fact, the company behind eBizNet is 7Hills which had an interface between NetSuite and its standalone WMS years ago.  From the developers perspective, developing on the platform has to be a much better model. The cost of maintenance must be cents on the dollar compared to maintaining a separate application and interface. And for NetSuite the addition of completely integrated functionality is really compelling. Win Win, and when you add the seamless workspace for the customer it’s Win Win Win.
  • OK, NetSuite’s new functionality with search and the ability to build reports from searches with pivot table like functionality is very cool, and received huge cheers from the crowd. Exposing the entire database to user queries via the metadata layer has been a big challenge, and giving customers the ability to generate reports from the metadata has also been a big challenge. The new functionality, part of the newly titled SuiteAnalytics is a huge step forward. Wonder if we will ever see the ability for users to generate their own metadata objects?
  • Qontext and Yammer: Both of these offerings add some social interaction for your NetSuite users. They can now see who is working with a customer record and interact outside of or in response to actual transactions. This is a very helpful step toward helping an organization communicate internally about their business, and do it in their business system. It’s not just an sales process anymore, it a customer management process. Both Qontext and Yammer had interesting little demos. It appeared that Qontext was built on the SuiteCloud platform and was therefore more integrated, while Yammer was a third party app with a web services link.
  • There were several other companies introduced that now have interfaces to/from NetSuite. This is all part of being a larger player in the enterprise. I still like the integrated apps more myself, but there are definitely organizations that must have advanced functionality for billing and sales compensation.

All in all it was a really interesting 2 morning with NetSuite. The company is obviously starting to move out in some very significant ways. When you consider that they have been building this since 1998 you have to congratulate them on their determination, patience and hard work. Well done. Is there a single other software vendor in the midmarket that offers such energy and innovation?

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Day One Of NetSuite Suiteworld 2011

Published May 11, 2011 | By Tom

Some of the most interesting things I heard from Suiteworld day 1:

  • “Let’s face it, no one wants to do accounting in the cloud, they want to do business processes.” From Zach Nelson’s morning Keynote yesterday. He’s right. Selling accounting in the cloud is silly. Selling a business process that includes vendors, customers, partners and your employees acting through the cloud is the way to go. We are just starting to see the possibilities here. More NetSuite B2B customers should be using vendor and customer portals, another point that Nelson mentioned.
  • Accenture comes on board as a partner. This is how NetSuite is going to sell to the Fortune 500, or 2500, divisions, like the recent sale they announced, Qualcomm. Accenture can handle the integration between OneWorld and SAP or Oracle as well, to marry the NetSuite results with the HQ CRM/ERP package. Qualcomm gets to keep its investment in SAP while leveraging the cloud for easier, faster, simpler division accounting and reporting. It’s a nice marriage.
  • Zach Nelson CEO started his talk by mentioning some of the small companies that started with NS when it was still NetLedger and still with the company after all these years. Wow that is significant.
  • Then there was a lot of talk about bringing the robust technology of large companies to the SME (small and medium enterprise) market, while giving the large companies the agility of the SME. NetSuite went out of its way, frankly, to let their current customers and prospects understand that they are not walking away from the SME even while they pursue the Qualcomms of the world, but let’s face it this is going to be really hard to serve both masters. Not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s very difficult. The big packages software vendors, SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft, all tried to serve the SME market after the Y2K glory days ended and it was a mess. They had the wrong ideas from start to finish, from licensing to implementation and support services, nothing worked well. They all blamed it on the robustness of the software, but my experience was that the software was not a problem at all. It was software and consulting managers who saw small deals as a waste of their time. It’s going to be interesting to see over time if NetSuite continues to serve the 5 to 50 person company, or if they see a constant movement of their best talent from the SME space to answer the needs of VIP clients.
  • Rapid Deployment: Groupon’s ability to go live with 10 subsidiaries within 8 weeks of signing their contract is an awesome accomplishment. They will have all 26 live in 6 months or so. Yes, more awesome. So what does this tell you about the implementation? Did they document a lot of their work? Spend endless hours trying to get every manager on board with change? Let the consulting team take all the risk? No, what it means is that Groupon took the reins early on, as only a willing young startup can, and figures to lead pole to pole. Formality, risk aversion and stupid politics kills large company IT projects more than anything else. Makes me glad that Accenture has volunteered for that duty.
  • The NetSuite economy grows in many different ways. There are more partners, both implementation and development and software. This is a good thing and really bodes well for the company. When you have mass like this it starts to create its own energy.
  • Baker Tilly and RSM McGladrey are two of the largest midmarket accounting firms in the country, and now they are also NetSuite partners. Interesting that when you visit their websites, as well as Accenture’s, they each have two mentions of NetSuite. Baker Tilly has a page devoted to the relationship, and it’s probably just early days for the others, but it does give you pause. Are these folks all in on NetSuite, or are they just toe in the water and waiting to see what happens? NetSuite has had their fair share of toe in the water partners over time with little effect on results. Would be nice to see one of their all in partners brought up on stage once, like Explore Consulting in Seattle.  Nelson gave Explore a shout out, but really where’s the love?
  • “When you are a NetSuite customer, you are an Oracle customer,” so said Oracle rainmaker Mark Hurd. Well truism or not, some people don’t like to be reminded. Dennis Howlett remarks:

There was a sharp intake of breath among media and analysts at that one. My take? Be afraid, be very afraid. -;)

I don’t think we have to be afraid, we simply have to reasonable. If you want the quality of software, the tools, the security and robustness of the big players you are going to pay the toll. Larry is not about to apologize for creating the best database in the world and give you a break. Oracle, and by default NetSuite, will have its pound of flesh.

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