NetSuite Turns to Partners to Help Ensure Customer Success

Tony Kontzer, Contributing Editor

May 17, 2016

A day before the crowds were to descend on the San Jose McEnery Convention Center for the start of SuiteWorld 2016, customers were already the talk of the place.

Hundreds of NetSuite partners gathered Monday afternoon for a kickoff event designed to build excitement, and it was clear there was plenty to get psyched about—namely, the growing focus on customer success.

Despite a track record that clearly demonstrates the value it brings to its customers, NetSuite is making bets that it can beef up that value even more by making ERP implementations(opens in new tab) even faster than they've been to date.

Specifically, NetSuite and its partners, which now number nearly 1,000, are increasingly relying on a "phased implementation" approach that's designed to not only speed up deployments, but also to ensure that, when completed, those deployments are even more in line with what customers need from their NetSuite environments. The approach is resulting in deployments wrapping up in less than 100 days.

"It's transforming the way we engage with customers," said NetSuite president and COO Jim McGeever.

And while the way NetSuite works with customers is resulting in speedier deployments, the work NetSuite's technical team is doing on the product also is translating to better deployments.

NetSuite founder and CTO Evan Goldberg reported that improvements to the NetSuite platform resulted in a 20 percent rise in performance during 2015. And the company plans to keep raising the bar going forward by expanding its capabilities in important ways:

-NetSuite now operates five data centers globally—three in the U.S. and two in Europe—and Goldberg said the company plans to expand that footprint in the near future.

-The company has introduced "purposeful" APIs for SuitePayments and SuiteTax, as well as SuiteNext, a next generation plug-in architecture for APIs built on the SuiteCloud development platform(opens in new tab).

-The new SuiteScript 2.0 brings a host of new tools to NetSuite's fast-growing developer community, which means more capabilities for a partner network that has created more than 260 certified applications.

In other words, data is moving closer to customers, who are also benefiting from the ever-expanding capabilities of both the platform and the partner apps they rely on.

"Whether they're small or large, our customers want to know that they're going to have room to grow," said Goldberg.

And as long as they're being supported by a growing, well-equipped partner community, they should have plenty of room.

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.