Downturn drives demand for cloud says NetSuite

Beverley Head
Monday, 19 October 2009 12:50

IT Industry - Development

“The other big thing that I think is accelerating the move to the cloud is if you are a company and have to make the transition are you going to bet your business on software that was developed before the internet existed…none of these (on-premises) applications have at their centre the internet.”

Given the internet’s heritage can be traced back to the 1960s, Nelson’s claim seems somewhat disingenuous. What can’t be glossed over however is the company’s ardour for partners – third parties keen to develop vertical applications which integrate with NetSuite.

To some extent these third parties will also have to compete with NetSuite itself which will also build some vertical specialist applications. Some third parties however might expect less competition from NetSuite, which is the case for JCurve which in June announced it was developing a small business NetSuite based system for Australian and New Zealand businesses.

Nelson said the JCurve small business system was currently in a beta version with 30 organisations involved in trials. 

Given that NetSuite also announced that Australian users can now join their US counterparts and download an application from the itunes Appstore which allows them to access NetSuite information via an iPhone or iPod touch.  Reinforcing the Apple connection, NetSuite generously gifted iPod nanos to press and analysts attending the Sydney briefing.

NetSuite also announced the availability of NetSuite Oneworld for Oracle which allows divisions or subsidiaries of large organisations which use NetSuite, to then back-end that data into Oracle corporate applications. (A similar system was announced for SAP back ends three months ago.) Given that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was a co-founder and funder of NetSuite back in 1988, the decision to provide an interface to Oracle isn’t surprising – although the fact this interface came after the release of an SAP version is perhaps more intriguing.

Technology analysts at the briefing also quizzed Nelson about customer concerns over having their sensitive data hosted in the cloud and offshore, where access might be sought under foreign legislation, such as the US Patriot Act. Nelson said that users weighed up “a hierarchy of concerns” such as the benefits of having data and systems managed by a third party and hosted in the cloud against having access to “their own data by the coffeepot.” Although he acknowledged that “The US government is not going to put their data in China and the healthcare sector might have some concerns,” most organisations were, he said, happy to have their data hosted remotely as long as it was secure and access was reliable.

Australian users who do have lingering concerns about their data being held offshore can’t expect a change in NetSuite policy any time soon. Nelson confirmed that “We are a couple of years off bringing a data centre to the region.”