It's been about two years since Oracle acquired NetSuite, and there has been a lot of positive momentum, change, and progress over the last 24 months. And while NetSuite was working on various research and development (R&D) projects well in advance of the acquisition, we’ve since added a host of new initiatives to our proverbial “to do” list.

For starters, we've always prided ourselves in the high levels of service that we provide to our customers. As a global enterprise, we know that it’s “always business hours” somewhere on the map, so we operate with a 24/7 mindset. This makes NetSuite unique in that it provides fast, efficient, and seamless upgrades around the clock.

We also invested in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the only cloud that can replace the on-premises data center, allowing companies of any size to run even the most mission-critical applications. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure blends all of the advantages of the public cloud with the control and predictability of on-premises infrastructure to deliver high-performance, high availability and cost-effective infrastructure services.

Connecting NetSuite with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Designed to take on the most demanding workloads, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure combines compute, networking, storage, database, connectivity, and governance to create a complete, reliable technology ecosystem—all in the cloud.

Now, many of our customers want to know whether Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will impact the processes that NetSuite has had in place for the last 20+ years. The answer is “no.” In fact, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will only improve our existing processes and speed when it comes to software maintenance and upgrades.

The reasoning is simple: Having a modern, elastic infrastructure will further reinforce and enable our execution.

Better Performance and Reliability

So, how does Oracle Cloud Infrastructure facilitate better performance and reliability? Well, because it's Oracle, it's enterprise grade—secure, scalable, reliable, and built for high-performance.

The key differentiators between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and other providers

To some, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bears a lot of similarity to other infrastructure providers

While there are certainly similarities between the two—fundamentally, the idea of a cloud-based infrastructure is the same, for example—the biggest difference is that these other vendors expect customers to build applications from scratch on their platform.

Knowing that a lot of customers are using existing software applications, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure takes a different approach. NetSuite, for example, would never rebuild its application from scratch in order to move it to new infrastructure. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure knows this, and allows us to port right into its environment in order to get NetSuite customers up and running quickly on the new platform.

Key Differentiators

Here are two more advantages of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:

  • It allows NetSuite to deploy additional capacity faster than ever. In the past, we were limited by the size of the NetSuite customer base and operational budget. Today, we can share resources with Oracle (and, because the infrastructure scales as Oracle scales, all of Oracle’s customers).
  • It allows us to deploy upgrades and evolve NetSuite’s service suite. We relied on our own standalone data centers; we had to recycle those computers because we couldn’t allow any of them to go to waste. By moving over to a programmatic way to allocate infrastructure, we can—from the application’s point of view—dispose of a computer and create a brand new one. That gives us much more flexibility with the way we deploy change. It also means that we can be much more systematic about moving forward, versus obsessing over what we’re leaving behind.

Now, contrast this last point with the way NetSuite built its classic data centers. At the time, we were not only pioneering in cloud computing, but we were also pretty good at building classic data centers. It was a big job; we would rack up more than 50,000 frequent flyer miles and take more than six months to get the job done.

By the time we were done, more than 100 people would've touched the process across more than 600 individual steps. The network cables alone cost us more than $80,000 (we would have a minimum footprint of 400 servers). We thought it was worth it, but it was a really big effort.

Fast-forward to today and these efforts have all been replaced by a single command. This helps to create unbelievable economies of scale that we pass right along to our customers.

I've been working with NetSuite for an awfully long time and during that time I’ve learned that no matter what, there's always something new around the corner. By focusing on continuous service improvement—and understanding that every event is a learning experience—we discover something new every day, and we get better because of it.

Continuous Learning and Discovery

At NetSuite, we’re always learning and discovering in order to give our customers the best experience and leverage the absolute best results for their own enterprises. We’re proud to serve as a strategic partner for companies across many different industries, and we look forward to even more of that in the future.