Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director
Ten years ago the idea of managing a company from one, unified, cloud-based suite of applications would likely have seemed unfathomable to many. Jesse Menczer, CIO of DiscTech, an independent distributor and value added reseller of enterprise storage systems, hard disk drives, solid state drives and networking technology, went looking for a comprehensive solution and just happened to find it in the cloud.
The San Diego, Calif.-based company launched using QuickBooks as its accounting software, but Menczer knew that this platform would not be sufficient to meet the company’s ambitious growth needs.
“I knew from the beginning I wanted to have as close to a one stop shop as possible,” Menczer said. “I spent three years evaluating different platforms to find if there was a way to do it in one large suite.”
What he found was NetSuite, and DiscTech now runs its entire business on it, including financials, inventory, CRM, customer support, payroll and ecommerce. Not one to rush into things, Menczer took his time implementing it as well.
“The goal was not to piece-meal it,” Menczer said. “We wanted to make one large transition. Rip the band aid off as quickly as possible, so to speak. We went live with everything on the same day. It was an aggressive maneuver.”
And one that paid off. In the past 10 years with NetSuite, DiscTech has grown top line revenue by about 1,000 percent, staff by 700 percent and it now counts 80,000 customers selling globally.
Menczer said the company went with NetSuite probably before it needed that level of functionality.
“We adopted NetSuite long before we were economically ready for NetSuite, with the belief we would grow to a place where it made sense without having to undergo the forklift upgrades in the middle of the process,” he said. “We had faith the product would stand up to the promises and it did. Here we are many years later and it’s still working smoothly.”
Both NetSuite and DiscTech have grown together. Ten years later, NetSuite now counts 20,000 companies and divisions as customers. That growth can be found particularly in the functionality.
“When we started, we didn’t have integration with everything we wanted and we didn’t necessarily have every feature we wanted,” Menczer said. “Many of those features or holes have been plugged without us having to do any heavy lifting.”
For example, DiscTech was hoping for a packaged integration with PayPal and within a couple product revisions the PayPal integration was there and working well.
“We’ve seen it really mature and become a much more comprehensive feature set,” Menczer said. “We’ve seen NetSuite listen and adapt to our requests, so we’ve seen the product become more effective and efficient than before.”
One feature in particular, the ability to serve up inventory data to customers through the website or other business entities.
“We can tell what we have and when we have it,” Menczer said. “That means we can reduce customer service calls and increase sales because customers are confident we have the product and we’re confident we have it available.”
Hopefully the next 10 years are just as fruitful as the last 10 years for both companies.
