Cloud ERP vendor NetSuite has confirmed its offer to switch Australian and New Zealand users of SAP’s Business by Design system to its platform for free for a year…
There has never been much love lost between NetSuite and SAP, and the confusion recently over whether SAP was pulling the plug on Business by Design, its cloud-based offering, was enough for NetSuite chief executive Zach Nelson to issue an offer of a year’s free subscription to SAP defectors.
On a visit to Sydney this week he reaffirmed the offer, although the company’s local managing director and regional vice president Mark Troselj declined to say whether the company had directly approached the NSW Government which is rolling out one of the world’s larger Business by Design deployments for over 8000 users.
SAP has since attempted – not terribly successfully – to clarify the series of confusing messages about Business by Design by denying it is pulling the plug, stating rather that it is re-engineering it for the HANA platform, but NetSuite is standing by its offer according to Nelson.
He said that organisations moving to the cloud needed “to be careful about the vendor you select. It’s a strange thing – the world’s largest application vendor – can you trust them now?
“The leader in the last generation is never the leader in the next generation. If there was any company able to build a rival to NetSuite it should have been SAP,” said Nelson.
Even without its free defection offer, NetSuite has been growing the business locally, claiming more than 1000 Australian users of the system out of a total global population of around 16,000 users. This week it announced Lonely Planet, payments gateway eWay and Toll Holdings as recent wins.
Nelson also foreshadowed a new unified billing system, intended to further streamline online sales to be released in 2014. It was, he said, “the killer app from an ERP standpoint”.
NetSuite released its third quarter results earlier this month, reporting a 34 percent increase in quarterly earnings to $US106.9 million, which Nelson this week said had the company lined up for $US410 million of revenues this financial year.
NetSuite has however yet to make a profit, focusing instead on growth. Nelson said that this would continue to be the strategy, although the company “could be profitable tomorrow if we stopped hiring salesmen”.
