I attended executive keynote at SuiteWorld 2018 earlier today. In a traditional way, 2nd day keynote is usually about product and technology. Cloud product and technology is a topic that near and dear to my heart. Enterprise product and technology are moving to cloud and therefore, NetSuite as one of the pioneers of cloud ERP technologies founded 20 years ago was my primary interest.
Collaboration is the name of the game
For NetSuite, collaboration and team productivity is the name of the game. NetSuite is sending a message of growth and it is resonating very much with team collaboration. According to NetSuite, collaboration goes much beyond emails and document routing. The following slide can give you an idea of what is that about.
Project accounting and collaboration is another interesting topic. Traditional workflows are suffering from multiple data silos and Excel exchange syndrome. NetSuite is suggesting a better way to solve the same old Excelware problem.
Technology
Two years after Oracle acquisition, NetSuite is sending a message about leveraging Oracle infrastructure, technology and applications.
At the same time, NetSuite presents modern technologies of Java Scripting, RESTful services and data modeling.
Centralized data modeling is especially interesting to maintain flexible enterprise infrastructure.
Data Analytics
Data is a key and to have ability to search , query, slice and dice data is extremely important. Therefore, analytics services are extremely interesting.
Analytic application is another way to present data in a role-based, dashboard like approach.
Machine Learning and AI
A special topic of machine learning was preserved for the end of presentation. Machine learning is fascinating topic and it shows how NetSuite is planning to leverage data and their multi-tenant architecture allowing to generating intelligence from customer data and behaviors.
An example of search driven application intelligent application behavior.
What is my conclusion? It is all about data. NetSuite is not your fathers ERP system. It presents interesting technological stack and vision to develop cloud technologies and products aligned with modern requirements and trends. Analytics and machine learning capabilities are fascinating. It made me think about how NetSuite application and technologies will be adopted by manufacturing companies and especially by the companies that today defined as low fit. These companies will demand high level engineering and product development integration, product data collaboration with contracts. Machine learning and AI driven features will demand seamless data integration, which can bring lot of values. It looks like next several years will become an important for advanced manufacturing development for NetSuite and developing strategy of integration with engineering software. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.
