‘We Can Bill it’: NetSuite Releases SuiteBilling

Tony Kontzer, Contributing Editor

June 13, 2016

With technology forcing companies in every industry to adopt new business models, NetSuite is giving them the ability to manage product, service and subscription-based models within a single system.

NetSuite's new SuiteBilling solution, announced Tuesday at SuiteWorld 2016 in San Jose, Calif. represents the largest investment in man hours NetSuite has ever devoted to a single product, with good reason.

"What's happening in the cloud economy is that every company has every one of these business models now," NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson told the thousands of customers and partners who packed the keynote hall at SuiteWorld. "That is the future of every company."

In other words, adding new business models is becoming fashionable, and companies need NetSuite to act as their business process tailor.

"Hybrid is the new black," added Jim McGeever, president and COO of NetSuite. "The features we're building here are incredibly rich. If you can sell it, we can bill it, and we can recognize it."

SuiteBilling combines billing(opens in new tab) and revenue recognition across revenue sources, greatly simplifying the process of managing multiple business models. What's more, with new revenue recognition(opens in new tab) rules taking effect all over the world, the ability to combine billing and revenue streams is taking on added importance.

Aspect software has been embracing new business models as its made its call center software available via the cloud, beefed up its services business, and begun selling its products to solve different kinds of business problems.

Jim Haskin, CIO of Aspect, told the SuiteWorld keynote audience that removing complexity is key to enabling innovation and increasing speed-to-market. The company moved to NetSuite last year after years on an ERP platform that was holding the company back, and SuiteBilling will help it get even more of a handle on its growing complexity.

"We have every flavor of billing issue," said Haskin.

At Cisco Systems, revenue recognition is still a highly manual process for new consumption models, said May Tran, the company's "business transformation specialist." And with many of Cisco's solutions incorporating hardware, software and service components, a single invoice can have hundreds of thousands of usage records. As a result, the automation SuiteBilling can bring to the workflow will be a welcome development.

"I think we're going to see a lot of happy finance folks," Tran said.

SuiteBilling promises to provide customers with more control over billing and revenue recognition processes with features such as enhanced order-to-revenue, role-tailored user experiences and rich, and customizable customer billing portals.

Said McGeever: "We’re giving our customers a next-generation solution to win in the marketplace today and future-proof their business for change tomorrow."

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.