Hoping to fend off incursions into its on-demand market turf from major competitors such as SAP, NetSuite Inc. yesterday unveiled a major new release of its hosted enterprise software suite that includes new vertical industry versions of the product, new user interface features, and tools to allow customers to build custom business processes on top of NetSuite's hosted applications.
The new NetSuite, version 11.0, includes a release specifically designed for small and medium-size wholesale distribution businesses. It also includes releases tailored for services and software companies.
The new Wholesale/Distribution Edition of NetSuite includes inventory and fulfillment, inventory replenishment, and CRM modules as well as a business dashboard and a customer portal. The wholesale distribution edition also features support for light bill-of-material management and light assembly operations, said Sean Rollings, NetSuite's senior director of product marketing.
With this release, NetSuite becomes one of the first vendors to target specific vertical industries with a hosted enterprise application service. The move, said NetSuite President and CEO Zach Nelson, is intended to help the company develop closer ties with customers and offset the entry of major competitors such as SAP into the on-demand space.
Recently, SAP announced plans to offer an on-demand version of its CRM product mainly to large enterprise customers. Oracle Corp., with its recent acquisition of Siebel Systems, has strengthened its on-demand offering. And software-as-a-service purveyor Salesforce.com has recently become a more direct competitor for NetSuite with its recently released AppExchange, a service for integrating a wide range of third-party applications with its core on-demand CRM offering.
NetSuite, which was founded and is still majority-owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, has offered an on-demand application service to small and medium-size companies since its founding in 1998. The company claims 7,000 customers.
Despite the new vertical industry focus in version 11.0, however, NetSuite officials said the company has no plans to offer a complete manufacturing-focused edition of the on-demand service with such modules as materials resource planning, demand planning or supply chain management.
"We have no near-term plans for a manufacturing version," Rollings said. "It's not on our roadmap right now. We've decided that our priorities will be in other areas." Rollings said NetSuite reseller partners may offer manufacturing-specific extensions to the suite. So far, however, none have.
About 10% of NetSuite's current customers are manufacturing companies, Rollings said.
Some customers have developed their own extensions to the NetSuite product that fill some of the manufacturing gaps. China Manufacturing Network LLC (Irvine, CA), for example, has beefed up NetSuite's BOM tool to support its business, which involves hiring contract manufacturers in China on behalf of U.S.-based customers. According to China Manufacturing Network President Everette Phillips, the company is anxious for NetSuite to improve its product's support for manufacturing companies.
"We're actively involved in lobbying for that," Phillips said. "I'm hopeful that NetSuite will respond."
Besides the new vertical extensions of its hosted product, NetSuite also added a new graphical user interface and customization tools.
The user interface relies on more extensive use of the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web programming technique which company officials said allows for a more interactive and Windows-like user interface delivered through a Web browser. The new NetSuite user interface features role-based user dashboards and access to items such as graphical reports through collapsible windows.
The collapsible nature of the windows saves space and allows users to more easily tailor the interface, said NetSuite Chairman Evan Goldberg. For example, users can create their own reports by searching on a specific field in the NetSuite database, changing a column label and then adding it to their interface as a dashboard.
The new customization capability in version 11.0 is enabled by what NetSuite calls SuiteScript, a scripting language and tool, based on JavaScript, that allows customers to modify or create business processes that incorporate data and transactions from the NetSuite applications. Goldberg, for example, demonstrated the creation of a business process, using SuiteScript, which automatically alerted a manager when a sales representative attempted to enter an order that included a discount exceeding a pre-defined amount.
The new user interface and SuiteScript features in version 11.0 will be made available starting this month to NetSuite on-demand customers at no additional charge. The Wholesale/Distribution Edition of NetSuite is available now at a cost of $999 for the initial "base unit" and $99 per user per month.