Moving Upmarket: NetSuite Muscles Onto SAP's Turf
The move is NetSuite's second big step this month to provide a way for its Software-as-a-Service applications to work with competing products. Two weeks ago, the company unveiled SuiteCloud Connect for Salesforce, software that businesses can use to link their Salesforce.com CRM applications with NetSuite's ERP and e-commerce applications.
The new NetSuite OneWorld for SAP at its core uses similar technology called SuiteCloud Connect for SAP that incorporates application and data integration standards such as SOAP Web services, ODBC and JavaScript.
While NetSuite's customer base today is largely made up of SMBs, the vendor is pushing into larger companies either as a replacement for legacy applications or as a departmental/divisional solution.
NetSuite is seeing more demand from large companies for SaaS applications, said Mini Peiris, product management vice president. A division or subsidiary of a company that uses SAP software in its corporate data center can subscribe to NetSuite's application services more quickly, easily and cheaply than it can expand the SAP applications out to more users, Peiris said.
SAP offers its own SAP Business ByDesign set of on-demand applications for SMB customers. It also offers the SAP All-in-One application set for midsize companies, but those are on-premise applications.
Employees also find NetSuite easier to use than SAP, she argued. "Ease of use has always been a focus for us," she said.
With SuiteCloud Connect for SAP, for example, employees in a corporate division can use NetSuite's applications for handling invoices, purchase orders, inventory management and expense reports, to name a few, then roll up the data into the corporate SAP systems.
The new software gives NetSuite channel partners the opportunity to implement OneWorld at customer sites and link it to SAP systems. Some NetSuite solution providers have developed custom NetSuite-SAP links and Peiris acknowledged the new product could compete with those. But she said it would also create more awareness of the benefits of such links and increase sales of NetSuite applications within SAP environments for channel partners.
Peiris said software to link NetSuite applications to other enterprise software is under development -- links to Oracle's applications would be a logical next step -- but she declined to comment further.