SAN FRANCISCO — On-demand software company NetSuite on Wednesday took the wraps off its new global services suite, designed to offer consolidated business management tools for companies with multiple regional or multinational subsidiaries.
NetSuite
The offering, an add-on to NetSuite’s One System architecture, is designed to eliminate what CEO Zach Nelson called “the hairball” — the collection of multiple applications that add layers of complexity to an enterprise and kill the chance for real-time analysis.
“You will never solve the problem by having more systems, you will solve the problems with less systems,” he told the crowd gathered here at a launch event in the city’s financial district.
NetSuite targets OneWorld at companies with a global sales reach, making them likely to most acutely feel the difficulties of managing a host of business applications — difficulties that are e compounded when having to handle accounting across divisional or national boundaries.
Built around a dashboard that shows business operations in real time on a national, regional or global perspective, the service also uses a single, consolidated database for all of a company’s global units. It also offers instant currency conversions to aid in accounting across divisional and national boundaries.
As a result, a company’s Japanese business can be viewed in the dashboard in Japanese, with all sales displayed in yen, while another Asian division could look at those numbers in their local currency. If the country is headquartered in the U.S., business would be converted into dollars.
Such calculations are done in real time, with data from all of a company’s global units managed in OneWorld’s single database.
This design can help global companies put together a consolidated profit and loss statement or cross-divisional sales forecast within minutes — rather than having to launch separate applications in each country, undertake currency conversions, and so forth. The system also adds regionally appropriate functionality, such as currency, taxation and language.
A NetSuite customer on hand at the launch event — Dan Buettin, CFO for Domin-8 Enterprise Solutions — said his company was able to install the offering in six weeks, a speed unheard-of for ERP installations.
He added that it greatly simplified financial analysis.
“There are companies doing this all the time, but you do it with financial analysts and accounting folks who try to drill down on your data,” he told the audience. “The problem is once you get into that process and try to do an analysis, it’s already stale. The question is for a point in time, and it takes too long to get an answer.”
NetSuite OneWorld is available now for existing NetSuite customers, at a price of $1,999 per month, on top of a customer’s existing NetSuite subscription cost.
