NetSuite offers 'unlimited' cloud apps, social data

MANILA, Philippines -  Virtually the sky’s the limit for on-demand application vendor NetSuite which recently launched a new line of “unlimited” cloud applications, enterprise social networking capabilities, and more “suitelets” for companies, big and small, that are into cloud computing.

In its first SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco, NetSuite executives led by CEO Zach Nelson showed how their product lines are expanding along with their lists of customers and partners.

On the first day, NetSuite quickly pulled out the big guns by announcing a new version of NetSuite Unlimited which gives customers all 26 NetSuite modules for an unlimited number of users and subsidiaries, unlimited suite applications and unlimited storage. The price is pegged at $1 million a year which, Nelson said, “is much cheaper than what SAP charges or anything you are doing.”

Clearly made for large companies, NetSuite Unlimited has the company managing the servers, security and other aspects of a datacenter operation. Nelson said they poured into it $50.4 million in research and development and operations alone to guarantee a 99.98 percent uptime.

To successfully grasp the cloud in this grand fashion, NetSuite turns to one of, if not its biggest investor, Oracle Corp. NetSuite plans to use Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine to run NetSuite’s cloud applications.

“We can’t do anything without Oracle database, which is an incredible piece of technology. Our Java servers are on Oracle. And now, we can deliver the power of Exadata Database Machine from Oracle that normally most companies can’t afford to run by themselves,” said Nelson.

SuiteWorld, which to some extent had the feel of an Oracle OpenWorld conference although in a much smaller scale, in fact brought Oracle president Mark Hurd on stage to validate NetSuite’s work and the two companies’ cooperation, which boiled down to one powerful endorsement for NetSuite.

“The stuff these guys do with our own stuff is awesome,” Hurd said to a ballroom full of NetSuite customers, partners, developers, analysts and the press. “A customer of NetSuite is a customer of Oracle,” he added.

Two of those customers are Jollibee Foods Corp. which, Nelson said, went live on NetSuite in 10 locations in two months, and ABS-CBN which had a one-year rollout.

Yammer

NetSuite also took social networking for business to a new level by tapping a company called Yammer to add social networking dimension to its ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relations management) cloud applications. This will result in another cloud app to be called SuiteSocial which will present all data that goes in NetSuite applications as “activity streams” through Yammer to improve real-time collaboration.

Because being social is more than just status updates or feed updates, SuiteSocial will make all data activities and records in a NetSuite app much more collaborative and social, from streaming data to how a user consumes those data. It will have a “follow” button so users can follow the activity streams happening in a certain file or applications that are being fed to Yammer.

The activity streams aggregate all actions in a certain transaction as Yammer feeds. NetSuite users can also create an external network so channels, for example, can collaborate with them.

Nelson said the social networking capability will serve well their partners who are mostly in the cloud now and have produced 40 percent more client bookings for them during the first quarter.

Yammer, which has over two million corporate users of its enterprise social networking service, will develop the “Yammer Technology Streams” that will form the foundation of the alliance with NetSuite. SuiteSocial will also have enterprise-grade security policies and parameters in place when it rolls out.