NetSuite boosts sales of OneWorld all-in-one business SaaS offering

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 21 January 2009 09:59

IT Industry - Market

Business SaaS vendor, NetSuite, has announced a series of customer wins in the region for its OneWorld SaaS offering that includes accounting, ERP, CRM and eCommerce functions in one integrated package. These include Australian company, Campus Living Villages which builds and operates on-campus student accommodation in Australia and overseas.

NetSuite's OneWorld, released in the US in April 2008 and in Australia, New Zealand and other regional nations in September 2008, is claimed to be "the first and only announced on-demand system to deliver real-time subsidiary management and business consolidation capabilities to mid-market companies for accounting / ERP, CRM and ecommerce operations." It is claimed to deliver these at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premise ERP solutions.

In addition to Campus Living Villages (CLV) the new customers are: Reliability and Confidence Gas Corporation (RCGC) of the Philippines; Hong Kong based StrapMedia which has developed FlashPop, billed as an easy-to-operate device that customers can pre-load with any type of audio content, including music and audio books; and Singapore based Profoto Digital Services, an advertising and marketing company that provides display products and services ranging from indoor/digital services to lab and outdoor service.

Campus Living built its first on campus village at Sydney University in 2003 and since then has expanded internationally. It owns and operates similar accommodation in the UK, USA and New Zealand through a network of 100 subsidiary companies. CFO Joanne Wakefield said that OneWorld's ability to deliver local controls within each subsidiary while providing global visibility had been a major factor in NetSuite winning the contract.

"NetSuite offered us a cost-effective fully integrated solution capable of spanning the globe with multi-regional support for tax issues, regulatory compliance, language and currency." She added that many options designed for large enterprise had been dismissed as cost prohibitive for a company of Campus Living's size.

NetSuite has been represented in Australia by distributor NetReturn for five years but for the past year, since VP of international sales Johnny Jones became based in Australia, it has also operated direct. Jones said the company had about 500 local customers, the majority through NetReturn.

Jones said that NetSuite's SaaS offerings were suitable for "any business with one user upwards" and he told iTWire that the company was looking to boost its market presence through the appointment of additional channel partners, particularly those than could add value by integrating NetSuite's products with unified communications.

These include Brennan IT which became an OEM partner of NetSuite in August 2008 . It did not at that time disclose how it planned to add value to the NetSuite SaaS offering and Jones told iTWire this week that Brennan planned to provide integration between the NetSuite offering and its own unified communications products (in March 2008 Brennan IT acquired the telephony services business of ASX listed Tele-IP and that deal gave Brennan IT some 35 staff and 4000 business customers.)

Jones said that he expected many of the new channel partners NetSuite was looking to appoint would be ones that would similarly add value to NetSuite by integration its functions with unified communications products and services.

This integration between business applications and unified communication products and services has been identifed as a major growth market by leading unified comms players such as Avaya, Nortel, Cisco and NEC, which recently debuted, in Australia, its Application Net offering.

In October 2008 Cisco announced a major push into what it said was a nascent market for the integration of communication and business process with the potential to be worth billions of dollars annually.