NetSuite eyes up NZ

Online business application provider NetSuite is making a foray across the Tasman, signing New Zealand resellers Asparona and Datacom.

Delivered under an ASP model, NetSuite integrates ERP, CRM, eCommerce inventory, and financial information into one application, running on an Oracle database.

Mason Little, CEO at The NetReturn Group -- the exclusive Australian distributor for NetSuite -- said the company had been looking to jump in to NZ for more than six months, assessing whether the ASP model would work there.

"We were looking at 30 potential partners and selected two," he said.

The NetSuite offering went live in Australia in February last year and the company has sold the package to 70 customers, equating to around 1000 users. In the United States there are 8000 customers, Little said.

The company would do revenue of around $7 million here for its financial year ending 30 June 2005.

Its largest customers include financial group ING and Lexis Nexis, which have both purchased only the CRM component of the package. Other notable customers include Mainpac, Dialect and Argus. Around 90 percent of all customers are buying the total integrated package, Little said.

82 percent of buyers purchased the product due to its "integration" capability. Little claims that users can basically "rip out" existing financial and CRM systems and replace them with the NetSuite package at a lower cost.

He said NetSuite "covers off the middle ground" of the business application space and is suitable for users that had outgrown a package like MYOB but didn’t want to invest in expensive platforms such as SAP.

NetSuite has around seven active partners in Australia which include Duval, and Pitcher Partners. Deloitte was also testing the product.

Companies are charged a one or three year licensing fee to use NetSuite and are required to pay for data migration and training services and application hosting. NetSuite is hosted at a Telstra data centre in Milsons Point in Sydney.