Oracle business software unit NetSuite is holding its annual SuiteWorld event in Las Vegas this week, and announced a massive list of cloud- and AI-related product launches and enhancements, that the channel will have to get its head round.
In his keynote to the 7,500 crowd, NetSuite CEO Evan Goldberg said the firm had now reached the 40,000 customer mark, and operated 36 data centres across 17 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions around the world. In addition, new ones will be added in India and Brazil next year.
“It’s all systems grow”, said Goldberg (pictured on stage), “We’re re-imagining the user experience and giving them a better bird’s eye view of their customers.”
Key to this is Redwood, which delivers user interface and usability improvements. The design system experience has, and is, being deployed across NetSuite products to improve lists, forums, dashboards, events and search features, “to give you what you need now, to give you everything you need to know about your customers in one place”, said Goldberg.
In addition, a large number of NetSuite modules have been updated to deliver better results and improve productivity. For instance, Financial Exception Management has been loaded with AI algorithms to detect exceptions automatically and present their financial importance to help mitigate them. “It finds and fixes to deliver your financials”, Goldberg said.
And SuiteProjects Pro now includes AI insights to study projects quicker to solve delays and other problems more efficiently, while Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) delivers more insights quicker, again, using AI. For instance, with the latter, a motor company with a battery shortage problem, can use EPM to locate a provider to get more of them. They can ask AI to generate a chart, that will then inform them that the shortage will be corrected within a quarter. The tech will make sure solutions offered integrate with a company’s needs.
AI is also being included to bring deeper actionable insights to Analytics Warehouse. It can tell you you will be out of stock of a product in a week, and allow you to run queries within parameters, and generate 50 visualisations using filters and chart types etc.
As an added incentive, NetSuite is currently offering 50% off new deployments of EPM and Analytics Warehouse. There are discounts for a number of other products too.
“This is AI for everyone”, Goldberg said, and then went on to list a number of other product upgrades. The “Ask Oracle” feature is being brought into the suite through the search box, and a Suite Analytics Assistant is being offered to deliver conversational insights through a bot. You can ask it, for instance, “Which campaign generates increased sales in a particular line”, or “Do we have enough stock to meet forecast predictions”.
Also, NetSuite Text Enhance, which is used to generate corporate and branded content, has been loaded with 200 new writing experiences using AI. And Prompt Studio improves Text Enhance by making sure content generated meets style and branding rules.
On the developer front, SuiteScript API uses generative AI to improve code securely without having to leave the OCI environment, and Code Assistant for SuiteScript allows “cut and paste” code building, and works with SuiteCloud.
IT Europa, in attendance at SuiteWorld and bigger show Oracle CloudWorld, counted at least another ten product upgrades, and asked NetSuite’s channel leaders whether partners were geared up to cope with so much action. Earlier this week we also reported on the closer product integration and delivery announced between Oracle and Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.
Craig West, NetSuite global vice president for channel sales and alliances, said: “Since the acquisition by Oracle eight years ago, we’ve gone from 11,000 customers to 40,000. Some of our partners are still core ERP consultants, while others are specialists in other areas.
“We’re helping partners with all the new products and investing in enablement, but it can’t just be doable on their part, there’s got to be real intent.”
One solution is partner alliances. “One day some partners will be competing with each other, another day there will be cooperation between them to give the customer what they want, by sharing specialisms on different implementations if they don’t have specialists of their own,” said West.
Chris Norfolk, EMEA channel director for NetSuite, added: “There is a phenomenal opportunity for partners in mainland Europe, our success is driven by them, and we always need more good ones – over the next 24 months we will be recruiting many more.”
