NetSuite: Still alive and kicking

Oracle OpenWorld had even more going on than usual. Larry Ellison was so focused on autonomy facilitated by database version 18c that he had only slide for a number of other features it will introduce like 5 times faster RAC. Thomas Kurian, in his keynote covered very wide ground and he barely had time to talk much about AI as a service and the analytics cloud. I had time to just shake hands with Steve Miranda and Chris Leone when I would have loved to spend much longer discussing the impressive SaaS results Oracle has been reporting.

So, given all this, it would not have been surprising if NetSuite had been forgotten at OOW. Indeed, many had projected that NetSuite would quickly disappear, post-acquisition into the Oracle black hole. Many of Oracle’s acquisitions in the last decade had underutilized the employee and customer assets they acquired. Oracle appears to have learned from them and is treating NetSuite differently.

Mark Hurd had the NetSuite keynote moved from a nearby hotel for breakout tracks to the main hall at Moscone. Several analysts had their schedules changed to spend time in the NetSuite track. We spent some time with Evan Goldberg, the founder and he told us SuiteWorld, Netsuite’s own annual event would continue next year.

The biggest boost to NetSuite is it is leveraging Oracle’s global sales channels. That is freeing up investment dollars to accelerate localizations for several key local markets. The slide below shows what NetSuite would have expanded on its own versus what the Oracle channel is allowing them to cover.

I hoped to hear Oracle’s industry groups would similarly allow NetSuite to expand its industry feature set. Evan said they would continue to be cautious and not expand the product set too widely. The current industry coverage (in slide below) is not bad but the white space of industry applications which have not seen cloud and other modern architectures is large.

Still, the good news is NetSuite continues with its own brand momentum, and Oracle may have learned to handle acquisitions better than it did in the past.