Executive Summary

• This article is part of our honest vendor series, which is one of the only ratings of vendors rather than applications.
• The vendor quality is critical to the decision making process as software purchases have a high long term involvement by the software vendor.

Introduction

NetSuite has gone through an exciting transition of names. Its founders, Larry Ellison and Evan Goldberg, originally named NetSuite NetLedger. For a while, it was called Oracle Small Business Suite before being renamed to “NetSuite.”

NetSuite is a fast-growing company. This is one of the negatives for customers in that NetSuite lacks the bandwidth to provide the type of service that its competitors provide. It is following other companies that have recently been taking support offshore, and once again, the quality difference is evident to customers.

NetSuite’s growth in terms of its new products has been of poor quality. NetSuite began as a provider of a good value limited application (its stand-alone financial product) and is turning into a poor value provider because of its price increases and its inability to come up with available products outside of OneWorld.

There are many indicators that NetSuite is calcifying and is a victim of bad management as well as Harvard MBA Syndrome. NetSuite has rapidly increased prices, reduced innovation, and poor quality new products. What is the compelling argument for new customers to purchase from NetSuite?

Our recommendation is for current customers of OneWorld to limit purchase from NetSuite to what is already owned. For those who are adding OneWorld to a software selection exercise, NetSuite is now a risky software vendor to become involved with. While they make a lot of marketing noise about how bad the major ERP vendors are (all of which we agree with by the way), they are beginning to act quite a bit like them. Companies should disregard the rest of NetSuite’s product suite.

Quality of Information Provided

The quality of the information provided by NetSuite is low. NetSuite begins by misclassifying its ERP system. As we note in the ERP section of our Enterprise Software Implementability, Maintainability, Usability, Functionality Ratings which are part of our Software Selection Packages, while often marketed as such, NetSuite is not an ERP system. It is a stand-alone financial system, which has critical inventory management and warehouse management functionality, which has used the ERP moniker for marketing reasons. That may help NetSuite sell their application for more money, by a common complaint by buyers is that non-financial functionality ends up being a disappointment. On the other hand, more software selections should be able to catch onto this fact.

Consulting and Support

We estimate NetSuite’s consulting as average and their support as a bit below average.

Internal Efficiency

Internal efficiency is low and appears to be decreasing. Considering how expensive NetSuite has become, its lack of improvement in OneWorld and the poor quality of its newer products bring up several questions regarding the efficiency of NetSuite’s internal operations.

Innovation

NetSuite was never particularly innovative but offered an easy to use the product that came around at the right time. NetSuite has been more of a marketer than a technology innovator. NetSuite also has a powerful backer in Oracle, and this has helped open doors and push its rather average software into a better-known area that it would have if it did not have Oracle as a backer.

Vendor Scores

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Software Selection Package for Finance & Accounting

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