NetSuite is on a roll with whopping growth and expansion (16,000 customers, 2,000 employees, and 700 partners) and is even now talking about profitability, positive cash flow, and a hefty cash position (contrary to the popular belief that cloud software vendors are not profitable in general). The company’s third SuiteWorld annual conference brought about 5,000 attendees, which is significantly higher than the 3,000 and 1,200 attendees respectively for the previous two years’ events. While retail and multi-channel e-commerce was the main theme at SuiteWorld 2012, SuiteWorld 2013’s main theme was that manufacturing is ready for cloud computing too.

NetSuite for Manufacturing
This week’s release of NetSuite Manufacturing Edition brings to the marketplace a solution for manufacturing and product-centric companies that includes a portfolio of capabilities such as production routings and scheduling, financials for manufacturing with standard cost and work in progress (WIP) accounting, inventory management with available-to-promise (ATP), and supply chain integration. While previously NetSuite mainly targeted outsourced offshore manufacturing, NetSuite Manufacturing Edition now caters to manufacturers that make their own products. The offering is still a fairly generic discrete manufacturing solution, but it is likely that NetSuite will make it more vertical, in part based on tuck-in acquisitions and partner offerings.

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NetSuite continues to round out its exacting capabilities for retailers and distributors. Having acquired the Retail Anywhere cloud point of sales (POS) system in early 2013, on the eve of the SuiteWorld 2013 conference NetSuite has acquired OrderMotion Inc., a provider of order management solutions based in Burlington, Massachusetts, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of OrderMotion’s cloud-based Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) Order Management capabilities adds to NetSuite’s own cloud-based order management system, furthering NetSuite’s focus on this increasingly important and complex business challenge and critical functionality—omnichannel order fulfillment.

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The popularity of cloud computing does not necessarily absolve cloud solutions from developing vertical industry focus. Thus, NetSuite and eWinery Solutions, a provider of direct-to-consumer (DTC) software and systems for the wine industry, have just formed a partnership to develop and offer an industry-specific cloud software solution. VinSuite will target wineries to help them compete at both the local and international levels.

The wine industry is increasingly competitive, with more than 8,000 wineries, 100,000 wine brands, and  100,000 wine retailers in the US, and new developments every week in Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. It is truly a global business, but the software systems used to run these businesses are fragmented—typically a winery has to use multiple disparate legacy systems, creating inefficiency and high IT costs.

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Just before the NRF BIG Retail Show 2013, NetSuite announced that it had acquired Retail Anywhere, a provider of multichannel retail management solutions. The acquisition builds on NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce platform, delivering a broad integrated cloud business suite for retailers, giving them what they need to open up new sales channels and expand their businesses globally. The addition fulfills a strong demand among retailers for a single commerce solution that supports the multiple customer touchpoints a retail business needs to succeed—from physical points of sale (POSs) at brick-and-mortar stores or other locations to call centers, social media, and business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce via desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

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Out of more than 12,000 companies and subsidiaries that depend on NetSuite to run their critical business processes in the cloud, about 2,800 customers use NetSuite for running their e-commerce Web sites. More than 10 years ago the vendor introduced an e-commerce offering, which has recently evolved into a commerce-as-a-service (CaaS) offering. For the post-iPad and Facebook world it has been redesigned to deliver the type of device-agnostic commerce expected of ever-more demanding consumers. Read the rest of this entry »