Posted by Adrian Bridgwater, Guest Blogger
NetSuite today significantly extended its strategic technology proposition. During this year's SuiteWorld 2015 conference and exhibition CEO Zach Nelson detailed news of a new strategic cloud alliance with Microsoft. This new partnership will connect NetSuite's cloud ERP platform to the Microsoft Office 365 productivity application platform and Microsoft's Windows and Azure Cloud.
High-impact productivity
NetSuite says it wants this new alliance to help create high-impact productivity in enterprise workplaces of all sizes and, crucially, this new connection should help facilitate “simplicity across mutual markets” inside new connected economies with a multitude of disruptive factors.
In simple terms, this is a new connection for ERP and productivity.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella appeared via video to remind the audience that his firm's mission is “to empower every individual on the planet to achieve more” today. From here Microsoft says it will work to blend Azure with the NetSuite platform more deeply.
“We are moving Microsoft out of the competitor file into our partner ecosystem now,” said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson. “The integration and the work that we are doing with Microsoft now is just the beginning. We will continue to work with the company on big data, ecommerce and other technology areas where we can continue to help small companies act big.”
Big companies act small, small companies act big
Equally though, NetSuite also says it is focused on helping big companies to act small i.e. giving larger corporations the chance to embrace disruption and act in a more nimble and agile manner.
An integration between NetSuite and Microsoft Azure Active Directory is available immediately, it will enable single sign-on (SSO) without the need for multiple passwords and provide centralized control of user authentication leading to role-based approaches to business management.
What happens next in this new union will be a process of cloud-to-cloud integration. This, in turn, will lead to a “single interface user experience” – which then logically leads onward to better productivity and collaboration, according to Nelson.
Less hairball, deeper alignment to Microsoft
This move to align with Microsoft extends beyond NetSuite customers and to NetSuite itself. NetSuite will migrate its entire employee base to Office 365 and also migrate from AWS to Azure for specific testing and integration hosting situations. Microsoft Azure will now be the preferred cloud infrastructure platform of choice for testing, for developers and for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to build new integrations to NetSuite's cloud business management suite.
NetSuite's Zach Nelson is passionate about moving away from what he calls the “hairball” effect created by disparate disconnected clouds and disparate disconnected ERP systems. This kind of industry marriage is precisely the kind of unification that Nelson views as a route to hairball eradication.
The two firms will now dovetail storage and compute power in Microsoft Azure with the business management intelligence of NetSuite's platform. It's a hairball antacid gastric neutralizer for less business indigestion.
