Netsuite Broadening its Horizons

By Ben Kepes on September 17, 2008

I received a Press Release this morning to tell me that Netsuite
One World, the mid-level SaaS business management software solution is
launching in Australasia. This is something of a sea-change, we've got a number
of SaaS accounting applications for SMEs such as Xero and Saasu,
but it's the first time that a "credible" mid-market play has been on offer. But
how credible is the Netsuite offering from a user-perspective?

Netsuite appears to be a fully featured offering that, according to their
website, offers the ability to;

Manage local operations across multiple locations, and roll the data up for
regional and global visibility in their currency of choice
Adjust for language, currency, taxation and legal compliance differences at
the local level, with regional and global business consolidation and control
Bring a newly acquired or created subsidiary online quickly into a
consolidated management view, supporting acquisition or rapid expansion of the
business
Reduce costs by staffing operations centrally, with the same employees
handling operations across multiple subsidiaries
Make informed executive decisions and timely course corrections with key
company metrics visible and measurable in real-time across all business
operations

Which all looks good so I decided to delve into some user experiences with
Netsuite – Netsuite prides itself on being the "one stop shop" for enterprise
business software – I decided it'd be interesting to see how this platform
approach works in the real world. Unfortunately not very well it seems.

For a start Netsuite is pretty pricey – the Australasian version is just
under AUD3000 per month – $35000 a year is quite a lot of software for a mid
sized business. You'd think with this sort of sticker price that Netsuite would
really be coming to the party in terms of conversion support, after market
support and general service – right? Not if this website
is anything to go by – true this could just be one person venting their spleen
at Netsuite but check out these two customer quotes;

NetSuite is a catastrophe: sales people promise the moon but there is little
flexibility, no support, and no willingness to help solve problems. My firms is
small and we almost went under because of the delays and costs of dealing with
NetSuite. We had to junk the entire solution and start over from scratch. Avoid
NetSuite at ALL costs!

We signed the deal back in the February/March time and had an agreed delivery
date of 1st September but by the time September rolled round, they’d pretty much
done nothing. I was horrified to find they needed to write scripts. At first it
was two but ended up as eight. About a week after delivery in the October, they
pretty much dumped me. That was around the time things started going badly
wrong. They never cleaned up the test data they used and we can’t get it out the
system. In the end we had to come off NetSuite.

Now I have to disclose that I haven't been privy to a Netsuite conversion,
and credit where it's due, Netsuite have got the jump on SAP in terms of go to
market for a SaaS offering. You'll recall that SAP delayed the release of their
own SaaS offering, BusinessByDesign – at least Netsuite has come up with the
goods.

But
for SaaS vendors – the key way to achieve scale is to create evangelists out of
customers – this sort of feedback doesn't do anything to help with that.

So what are our readers experiences with Netsuite – is it a revolutionary
offering or is it a prettied up dog?

Post script – In another development Netsuite has parted ways with it's largest
reseller Skyytek – I'll post some thoughts about that soon.