“The cloud has won, the argument is over and any software company that hasn’t moved onto the cloud is doomed,” stated Netsuite CEO Zack Nelson at the Suiteworld 2015 conference in San Jose this week.
Nelson and Netsuite certainly can say their software is selling with revenues increasing thirty percent over the last year, although the company’s overall losses were the same as a year earlier at $22 million.
As with all conferences the focus was on big product announcements with Netsuite showcasing their enhanced Point of Sale services, European data centres and their alliance with Microsoft.
Microsoft become partners
The video appearance of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to announce the partnership covering Azure web services and Office 365 is another step by Nadella to move Microsoft into strategic relationships with key cloud computing companies following another with Dropbox last month and with Netsuite’s fierce rival Salesforce last year.
For Netsuite the partnership offers the opportunity to integrate more tightly into Microsoft’s office productivity and enterprise tools that have been clawing their way back in marketshare after sustained attacks from Google and other cloud services.
In the product offerings, Netsuite was showing its push into ecommerce and retail showing off both its Point Of Sale system and its site builder capabilities with the big boast their back end services are “faster than Amazon’s.”
Taking the game up to Amazon is a big boast and it will be worthwhile seeing how the Seattle based giant responds, certainly for Netsuite’s customers having an e-commerce system that can match the industry leader will be a big attraction.
Rolling out the data centers
Data centers are always an issue for cloud computing services with the questions of redundancy, data sovereignty and latency being raised. The announcement that Netsuite will be opening centres in Europe will help the company in those growth markets.
For the Asia Pacific, there are no immediate plans for data centers in the region but the company’s main push is on developing deeper relationships into the Chinese markets with resellers and partners.
The international push is important for Netsuite with the proportion of its non-US revenues being stuck at just over a quarter for each of the last three years with Craig Sullivan, the company’s Senior Vice President for Enterprise & International Products, flagging China, Brazil and Germany as key growth markets in the coming years.
A native look and feel
In all three countries the company is betting on partners growing market share through a Most Valued Players and reseller programs aided by the company’s claim the software works natively in 19 different languages.
“We want international users feel like NetSuite was designed for them,” is Sullivan’s ambition for the service’s global operations.
Cloud computing may have won the software wars but there’s still plenty of battles to be fought over who will make the profits from the online software market, a fight not helped by evolving business models.
Suiteworld was a good demonstration of what Netsuite is hoping to fight that battle with. Whether it’s enough to succeed either as a company or a takeover target remains to be seen.
