NetSuite 'cloud' gets bigger in Phl

MANILA, Philippines - What do clouds have to do with those red roses you received today or with the burgers and fries you had at the cafeteria for lunch?

In today’s technology-centered world the answer could be, a lot.

Cloud computing, the performance and delivery of provisioned computing services based on Internet protocols, is now hitting its stride as more companies, big and small, find good business sense in doing it.

Islandrose.net, the e-commerce site of the Philippine Cut Flower Corp., is a good example of how far cloud computing has eased into our daily lives. Island Rose is using the cloud solutions from NetSuite, the San Mateo, California-based company that’s storming the cloud, so to speak, with its integrated online business applications for customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and Web commerce.

“Flowers are perishable so we need real-time data on our inventories to help us decide how best to sell them as quickly as possible,” said Dustin Andaya, chief marketing officer at Island Rose. “Doing things in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets just don’t work for us anymore. NetSuite allows us to see everything in our farm and in our current inventories in real-time. I can do promotions just for a day or within an hour based on the data I see.”

As for the “cloud-flavored” burgers and fries, there’s a chance they will be served at the cafeteria of the Mapua Institute of Technology. Mapua has already adopted NetSuite as a key component of its accounting degree curricula.

The opportunities to implement NetSuite solutions in other school operations, including the cafeteria business, don’t seem far-fetched if you ask John Alabastro of Pan Pacific Computer Center Inc., a solution provider of NetSuite in the Philippines.

“Can you imagine each cafeteria food having a barcode and (the data) will go up to the NetSuite cloud? I think the cafeteria people would like that,” said Alabastro.

Pan Pacific is managing the implementation of NetSuite in Mapua and in the other subsidiaries of the Yuchengco Group of Companies (YGC) which put up the Mapua-Yuchengco School of Business Management. Pan Pacific is a company under the House of Investments, which is part of the YGC conglomerate.

According to Alabastro, 11 YGC subsidiaries have adopted NetSuite OneWorld PH to replace three instances of Microsoft Dynamics GP, hundreds of spreadsheets and numerous manual processes. The move is part of YGC’s total ERP overhauling to meet with new regulatory tax laws.

Alabastro said going with NetSuite ensures them that the subsidiaries would have their systems running and immediately compliant with the new government tax requirements.

NetSuite benefits

Zach Nelson, NetSuite CEO, said Island Rose and YGC prove how companies of different sizes can both enjoy the benefits of cloud computing using NetSuite.

“On one hand, it’s hard to run a small business because it doesn’t have the resources of a big company. On the other hand, big companies want the agility of the small companies,” Nelson told the press during his trip to Manila last week.

“Every business today should be a cloud business... It’s just a matter of retooling their systems with the cloud in mind,” he added.

At present, NetSuite has over 10,000 companies and subsidiaries running its software. Nelson said it translates to about two million unique users.

NetSuite in the Philippines is fast expanding both in terms of client base and operations. The four-year-old local office now has nearly 500 employees. NetSuite’s Philippine operations include software architecture and integration, finance and back office support, professional services, client management and technical support.

“We originally came here in Manila because it can provide us great accounting skills. All our global support operations are now done here. We have since added professional services, marketing and sales functions to what we do here,” said Nelson.

By 2012, NetSuite Philippines expects to hire 200 more people, making it the biggest software company employer in the country, bigger even than the local offices of Microsoft and Oracle, Nelson said.

10-year edge

Would NetSuite also become the biggest cloud computing provider here and around the world? All Nelson is saying is that his company will always have that 10-year edge in terms of product development against the other companies that are just now trying to do something in the cloud.

Asked if he had seen or heard of the HP CloudSystem offering which spans new data center strategy, operations and technology consulting services, and a financing program to help companies migrate their IT operations to the cloud, Nelson looked amused and said, “Oh, they have?”

He then said that he believes the leaders of the client-server computing era won’t make it (well) into the age of cloud computing. In fact, Nelson said, “Client-server companies hijacked the technology innovation.”

Having said that, he surmised that cloud computing will be “the last great computing architecture.”

“What could top it? There would be new versions of how it would be done but the underlying architecture, I believe, would essentially be the same,” he said.

On that note, there seems to be enough time for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to get into the NetSuite cloud. Nelson said the BIR has one of the most complex tax systems he has seen and would be happy to see the government deploy NetSuite cloud solutions to dramatically improve its operations in real-time.