NetSuite released its second quarter financials in an amended S-1 registration statement this week, which also revealed that majority stockholder Larry Ellison is to relinquish his grip on the company to eliminate potential conflicts of interest while he remains CEO of software giant Oracle. Both moves help pave the way towards the company's much-awaited IPO — although sometimes it feels as though the IPO has been in the offing for so long, it ain't never gonna happen.

The challenges of sustaining growth may perhaps explain why NetSuite was talking up its partner play last week with the launch of SuiteBundler, which CEO Zach Nelson is calling "one of the most important pieces of software written in the last decade." SuiteBundler automates the process of packaging up custom configurations, add-ins and plug-ins as a bundle that can then be deployed in successive different implementations. It means partners can create custom functionality or even complete vertical implementations and then market them as their own intellectual property. NetSuite bills the customer a monthly per-user subscription that's discounted 30 to 50 percent from list price, and partners bill a separate price they set themselves for their own custom solution.
What's distinctive here is the ability to create reconfigurable customizations that encapsulate a partner's technical or vertical expertise, and which run on a hosted application with all the benefits of the on-demand model. NetSuite's underlying software automatically upgrades with new releases as it does for any other customer, but in the current release of SuiteBundler there's no capability for partners to roll out upgrades of their own customizations. That will change middle of next year with the 2.0 release, which supports rolling out upgrades to existing customers of earlier versions, either automatically or as a manual process.
NetSuite has some enthusiastic partners already but of course the strategy depends for its success on there being enough of them out there to really take the company into the kind of verticals that are currently the province of vendors such as Sage, Microsoft and the JD Edwards division of Oracle. Solution providers in such fields tend to be a pretty conservative bunch and will want to see evidence that NetSuite's approach will work for them before committing themselves in big numbers.