NetSuite's Australian office yesterday said it intended to extend its drive to capture Salesforce.com customers by significantly undercutting its rival's prices on its customer relationship management (CRM) offering.
NetSuite's Australian office yesterday said it intended to extend its drive to capture Salesforce.com customers by significantly undercutting its rival's prices on its customer relationship management (CRM) offering.
Campus Living's first village was at Sydney University (Credit: Sydney University, by Alex U, CC2.0)
NetSuite
announced its price-cutting drive, called "RenewForce", in November last year. It was only
intended to be in place until 31 December.
Because Australia came in so late, only just before Christmas, and
because of strong interest, NetSuite VP of international sales Johnny
Jones said, the company had decided to
extend the offer by a quarter to 31 March, solely in Australia.
The deal has already seen NetSuite sign a couple of Australian companies onto its
CRM product this month in deals worth around $100,000, Jones said,
although he couldn't say who they were.
The hope with the push, according to the executive, was
that once companies were using NetSuite's CRM, they might also
move over to the other offerings.
Late last year, NetSuite signed Campus Living Villages to its
OneWorld offering. The company manages or develops 50,000 beds over
50 campuses in Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK. OneWorld allows companies to manage multiple subsidiaries with one NetSuite
account, which handles different currencies, taxation rules and
reporting requirements.
Campus Living Villages has signed on for 100
licences for now, but has expansion plans to double that in the
next few years. The deal was worth millions, Campus Living CFO
Joanna Wakefield told ZDNet.com.au.
According to Wakefield, the company's current systems were "at
screaming point". CEO Iain Rothwell agreed, adding that the MYOB
general ledger system the company was using was not optimising
staff time.
"We employ some pretty skilled and clever accountants, but I can
tell you now at the moment most of their time is engaged in
producing the month-end results. There's very little analysis,"
he said. "We want to move to where the financial month end cycle
is actually a seamless process. And in fact, we can pay accountants
for what I think accountants do best, which is analyse."
The software as a service model suited Rothwell. "We didn't
want to invest our limited capital ... in hardware and boxes in our
head office," he said. "We simply didn't even have the resources
to maintain that type of model."
We didn't want to invest our limited capital ... in hardware and boxes in our head office
Campus Living Villages CEO Iain Rothwell
Yet there had been some
resistance to using software as a service. The conservative
accountants were frightened that their data would "disappear into
the ether", Wakefield said and they had heard horror stories of systems
going offline and slow response times. Rothwell considered these
stories to be outdated.
Rothwell said that the company had looked at around half a dozen
various platforms before deciding on NetSuite.
Campus Living Villages decided against Oracle and SAP because
the match wasn't right. "In my past life I've done large Oracle
financial implementations," Rothwell said. "I can tell you now
that when you're contracting a whole range of different
contractors in, you add a degree of difficulty to the process that
can become quite difficult and adds risk to the process."
MYOB was discarded because the company felt it had outgrown it.
A subsidiary in the US was using Intuit MRI, but was convinced by
the NetSuite system.
The roll-out will begin mid this year using New Zealand and the
UK as a pilot, with Australia and the US to follow. The general
ledger will be the first feature to come online. "We're going to
buy a Ferrari and use it like a nanna for a while," Wakefield
said, adding that once the ledger worked, the other features could
be added. "I think the biggest risk is that we don't properly use
it," she said.
Other companies who have signed up with NetSuite are the Ethan
Group with 300 users and Global Aviation which has 36 subsidiaries.