Netsuite big fish push to cut mid-sized Oz?

Australia is a top performer in a region that's beating the socks off other regions for Netsuite, according to the company's leadership — but the nation's performance has been in the mid-market, which could see change as the company guns for enterprise.

At the company's SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco, chief operating officer Jim McGeever placed Australia as "one of the fastest-growing parts" of the company's fastest-growing region: the Asia Pacific.

"Australia is largely a mid-market business, and that's where we've been and we're very deep in mid-market," McGeever said.

NetSuite has also drilled further down into Australia's small-business market than in other countries through its channel partner with JCurve Solutions, reaching customers with fewer than 20 seats. It's a model that they're happy with, and hope to replicate in other markets.

This week, the company announced partnerships with global systems integrator (SI) Accenture and one of the leading US financial services firms, RSM McGladrey, to target enterprise customers, and a new NetSuite Unlimited product that offers the entire range of NetSuite modules and unlimited cloud storage starting at a price above US$1 million per annum for up to 500 users. Further enterprise partnerships are expected to be announced.

It's a move that some analysts fear could affect Netsuite's efforts in its traditional market stronghold. Netsuite disagrees. It believes that providing more enterprise-level functionality will increase the appeal of its offerings to mid-sized businesses. It refers to its drive into the enterprise market as "adding the final storey on the house", and is creating a completely separate structure to handle enterprise customers.

"The sales teams aren't going to be mingled, the services teams aren't going to be mingled, so it's not as if we're running away and taking resources away from the mid-market," McGeever said. "The mid-market's still growing very fast for us. We're just adding this other piece, which is primarily to be driven by the global SIs." NetSuite staff who deal with the SIs are pulled out of the normal sales organisation and report directly to McGeevey as COO rather than to a head of sales.

Meanwhile, NetSuite OpenAir, the company's cloud-based product for professional services automation (PSA) and services resource planning software (SRP), has been selling "extremely well" in Australia, according to the company.

"I'm shipping consultants from Boston to Australia to help with the [professional services] work," said Tim Dilley, NetSuite's chief customer officer. None of the executives would be drawn on actual sales figures, speaking instead in terms of "building momentum" and "building community".

"Traditionally, Australians have adopted technology very quickly," Mark Troselj, NetSuite's managing director for APAC said. "We're a small country that's part of a global economy, and we're always looking to make sure that we're at the forefront, and make sure that we're competitive, and cloud is giving that to Australian companies."

"Many Australian companies act globally, we know that. We've got a great resource sector, we've got great wholesale distribution and great services companies and they provide solutions, especially across Asia, and the world," Troselj said. "We've got some figures that suggest more than 50 per cent of companies are adopting or looking at cloud in that part of the world, so NetSuite's perfectly positioned."

SuiteWorld also saw NetSuite announce SuiteSocial, which integrates business social networking tool Yammer into NetSuite in a concept similar to Salesforce.com's Chatter. It is expected to be available in Q3 this year.

Other announcements included integration with Google Apps, including Gmail and Google Calendar; new default accounting and tax compliance capabilities for NetSuite OneWorld for an additional 12 countries (Austria, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand and Turkey); and integration with a range of other software systems.

Stilgherrian is attending SuiteWorld as a guest of NetSuite.