Microsoft Great Plains forces companies to manage their business on separate on-premise software packages—one for accounting, one for warehousing, one for sales force management and one for services management, an approach that requires costly integration to get them to work together. The cost of implementation, integration and on-going application maintenance in such environments can be many times the cost of the software itself.

What's more, patching together Great Plains products and its partner solutions can result in multiple islands of data and expensive integration projects that often don't work the way you want. Our customers tell us that information often must be manually re-entered or batched into other applications — costing time and money. You can end up managing your business on incomplete information and guesswork.

In contrast, NetSuite integrates enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and ecommerce capabilities in a single on-demand application, with editions tailored for specific vertical markets.

Within a single, powerful application, NetSuite combines complete customer-facing CRM and ecommerce capabilities with back-office accounting/ERP and self-service portals for partners. As a result, it allows companies to unite fragmented data and automate processes from end to end. Your employees no longer have to re-enter data in different systems, rectify inconsistent or inaccurate data, or wait for batch updates.

NetSuite provides built-in functionality that Microsoft Great Plains just doesn't offer. NetSuite provides you with one system for business process management and real-time visibility. Our customers tell us that use of NetSuite results in smarter, faster decision-making.

Great Plains doesn't allow business data to move easily across departments, resulting in a lack of real-time visibility across key metrics needed to optimize business operations.

In contrast, NetSuite holds all corporate data in a single database, giving you access to your key performance metrics on a customizable, real-time dashboard. As a result, NetSuite enables you to make better, faster decisions. Employees can view and share accurate data in real time, leading to greater collaboration among departments and increased productivity across your business. In addition, full visibility into unified customer records results in more efficient and highly personalized sales, fulfillment, and service processes.

Microsoft Great Plains can prove to be an expensive and time-consuming business solution — both in the long and short term. With Great Plains, customers pay large fees upfront for the software and implementation. But the costs don't end there. Many of our customers who have switched from Great Plains tell us that the escalating costs and complexity of running their business software environment using Great Plains was a key reason for their defection.

For example, Great Plains requires that you manage the hardware, servers, and databases in addition to upgrading, troubleshooting, and maintaining the applications. You'll also need to have a database administrator on staff and hire a Microsoft Certified Partner to accomplish an upgrade once a year or so. This can be very expensive.

In contrast, NetSuite is delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), so not only is the cost of integrating disparate systems eliminated, but so too is the on-going cost of maintaining on-premise applications. You pay by the number of users per month. NetSuite manages your application, upgrades the software and provides reliable back-up and restore, all in a data center that is more secure and more reliable than you could economically build for yourself.

A Microsoft Great Plains implementation can cost one to one-and-half-times the purchase price of the software itself. What's more, Microsoft Great Plains is the latest rendition of a twenty-five-year-old product with at least 21 million lines of proprietary code. This limits you in two important ways: Great Plains is both difficult to customize and to integrate with other solutions. Add to that the resources required to maintain it.

With NetSuite, implementations are both faster and less expensive than with Great Plains. Advanced customization capabilities allow you to tailor NetSuite to your business practices — and migrate easily with upgrades. There's no maintenance to worry about, and users get a Web-based interface and role-based configurability. Because NetSuite is delivered via the Internet; all you need to do is open your browser, log on and use the application.

NetSuite also provides leading-edge professional services and educational programs that ensure efficient implementation and continued, long-term success.

Great Plains can't easily provide real-time visibility into your overall global and multi-company business operations. In contrast, NetSuite OneWorld is the first and only on-demand system to deliver real-time global business management and financial consolidation to multinational, multi-subsidiary companies.

With NetSuite OneWorld, you can manage companies with multiple subsidiaries, business units and legal entities all from a single NetSuite account, seamlessly handling different currencies, taxation rules, and reporting requirements. Individual users at the local level get an application in their language and can transact in the local currency with local taxes and financial compliance fully enforced.