Focused on fulfilling market needs and flexing to meet customer demands, software companies like NetSuite invest hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development (R&D) every year. Whether they are building out new products, revamping current offerings, or predicting customers’ future needs, these companies must be able to effectively translate their early “ideas” into concepts that address a targeted market niche.

Here at NetSuite, we fully leverage our own R&D capabilities plus those of Oracle, our parent company. Since it was founded, in fact, NetSuite has been a major consumer of Oracle technologies—including Java, the database, and WebLogic server. Oracle is the home of Java, and is a company that literally defined the term “relational database.” A pioneering force in the enterprise software industry, Oracle continues to blaze a trail into the 21st century.

Brainstorming and Making Critical Decisions

Since the acquisition of NetSuite by Oracle in 2016, we’ve been working very closely with other Oracle development teams. We call on those engineers, talk to them about problems, discuss opportunities, and share our views on the differences between cloud-based and on-premise software.

These exchanges have created a wonderful, two-way street that helps our combined companies bring technology to the market faster than ever. By providing a feedback loop into the larger R&D machine, for example, we can positively impact the progress that’s being made on Java, the database, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

At NetSuite, we continue to ramp up our own R&D investment. In fact, we’re doing it faster than we've ever ramped up before. In this way, Oracle’s R&D effort serves as a “force multiplier” for us. It's really that collaboration that allows us to accelerate.

When NetSuite was a standalone, publicly-traded company, a mandatory wall was in place between us and our vendors—with one of the largest vendors being Oracle. Now that wall has been torn down a more collaborative, connected R&D process extends across both enterprises.

Watch the video above for more.