NetSuite Debuts Down Under
Continuing a global expansion that began earlier this month in the UK, NetSuite Inc. on Tuesday brought its hosted business applications to Australia. The NetSuite product has been completely localized for Australia, from language conversion, to complex statutory requirements including industry specific tax codes, online automatic generation of BAS and IAS statements for direct submission to the ATO, and COA structures that allow businesses to manage tax affairs catered to their businesses and industry.
NetSuite is the first major application service to be hosted and delivered locally in Australia. Net Return, based in Sydney, will provide all sales, marketing and services of the NetSuite product line.
“Companies of all sizes need their business software to deliver similar functions, but SMEs are in a vacuum — they have outgrown their standalone, low-end software but can't afford the expensive systems designed for bigger businesses. So they ‘make do' with a disparate mix of un-integrated applications and manual processes making them uncompetitive, error-prone and slow-moving,” said Stuart McLean, managing director of Net Return. “NetSuite fills the vacuum by delivering a powerful, enterprise-class service for SMEs — the effectiveness of big business but at a dramatically lower cost.”
More than 90 percent of all companies in Australia have fewer than 500 employees. Most of these companies have been forced to buy separate, expensive software packages to manage their business — one for financials, one for order fulfillment, one for sales force automation, one for customer support. Then they spend an even greater amount of money on the hardware to run the software, and on the resources to install, maintain, and integrate the data from these incompatible systems, according to Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite
“The old way of implementing business solutions — buying applications from different vendors and struggling to implement them — is dying,” Nelson said. “NetSuite gives small and mid-sized businesses the benefits of an integrated, streamlined business application.”
NetSuite enables companies to manage all key business operations in a single application that includes complete customer relationship management; employee productivity; accounting; warehousing and product assembly; Web store and Web presence; and time and billing.
Since NetSuite is delivered as an online service, there is no hardware to procure, no large up-front licensing fee, and no software to maintain, update and upgrade. The product's “dashboard” user interface provides role-specific portal views of the application.
