Vinnie Mirchandani, The Deal Architect, and one of our favorite bloggers asks an interesting question about the ramifications of NetSuite's IPO. Of course, yesterday 'N', as it is now known on the street, debuted on the NYSE. It had originally sought a price of $13 - $16 a share, but ended up with $26, and the stock ended the trading day at $35.50. Vinnie's states:
Oracle 's Application Group would not exactly want to share too many details with the brash new player in the market flush with $ 160 million in its coffers.
The implied question is '"Does Oracle fear NetSuite?" Maybe, maybe not. During my years in Oracle Consulting, I worked on a couple of smaller deals and frankly, you felt like a pair of brown shoes in a world of tuxedos. But when I say small in the Oracle context, we are talking about a company with 350 employees. I cannot imagine Oracle in a deal with a 200 employee company, much less a 100 employee company. There are however several NetSuite clients that could probably run Oracle, if they were willing to live with the headache. A couple of them are our clients. One, Lyris, is a publicly traded software company with multiple subsidiaries. Another, UCG, is a trade publishing company, print and electronic, with over a 1000 NetSuite users. So while NetSuite can move upmarket in many cases, Oracle is too big to make it down the staircase to the SME market.
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