Posted by Amede Hungerford, Vice President of Marketing at NetSuite

The Internet and ecommerce, have made doing business internationally far easier than it once was. Now, even small regional based firms can sell products abroad. But being an international company still comes with some serious IT challenges: supporting different currencies and languages, connecting remote employees and partners to the ERP system, and ensuring that business processes and data run smoothly, and accurately, across a wide-ranging enterprise. Fortunately, cloud-based ERP is making it much easier for even small companies to conduct business abroad and our NetSuite Solution Provider Partners are evangelizing this message on a global scale.

”We are a fast growing company covering multiple geographies, so we need both scalability and the ability to deal with different tax and governance systems,” said Ian Clarke, chief executive at Fronde Systems Group, an IT services company in New Zealand and Australia.

Deploying and maintaining an on-premise ERP system requires on-site IT staff, a huge upfront investment in hardware and software, and days, or weeks, of work. Cloud-based ERP, on the other hand, is a quicker, more automated option and also offers some key advantages that on-premise ERP does not. One important advantage is the ability to have a single unified system that is accessible by all employees globally. It doesn't require on-site servers or even on-site tech support. Since the software is in the cloud, support staff can troubleshoot problems regardless of their geographic location.

CloudTech, an IT firm based in the Philippines, also has customers spread across multiple locations, which made it very difficult to install and maintain software and hardware, upload fixes, and provide individual tech support to users. That is why CloudTech opted to offer NetSuite's cloud ERP instead of an on-premise ERP application.

“The Philippines is an archipelago, with many islands, so setting up the system is no joke," said Martin Evangelista, managing director for CloudTech, a NetSuite Solution Provider partner. “We’d have to have so many connections, across so many regions of the country. The most logical way to implement ERP was over the cloud.”

Supporting different currencies and languages for customers was a challenge faced by Netsoft, a NetSuite Solution Provider partner based in Mexico, when it began expanding throughout Latin America and, most recently, into China as well.

“We have customers with offices, or their own customers, in other countries,” explained Hector Garcia, president of Netsoft. “Right now we’re partnering with people from China who also know NetSuite and are working with us to localize it. So we are able to provide consulting services in China as well as Latin America.”

As business becomes both faster-paced and more complex, the need for more comprehensive automation of processes as well as centralization of data will become increasingly critical for all businesses -- and particularly for international and fast growing companies.

As Clarke noted, “We see tremendous opportunity for cloud ERP in Australia and New Zealand. It’s ideal for fast-growing companies, which outgrow their internal systems and need something that is not only scalable but easy to use in off-shore locations.”

Hear international Solution Provider Partners describe how NetSuite is helping their customers go global: