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More Customers Move From Salesforce.com to NetSuite

NetSuite's One System Attracts Thousands of Customers From Both Stand-Alone and Patchwork CRM/ERP Solutions

SAN MATEO, Calif. — September 12, 2005 — NetSuite, Inc., the leader in on-demand business management software for growing companies, today announced that more companies have switched from fragmented CRM and ERP implementations to NetSuite's One System approach. To date, more than 100 companies have switched from salesforce.com and other legacy accounting applications such as Intacct, Great Plains, QuickBooks and Peachtree to gain the cost savings and productivity benefits of NetSuite's One System for CRM, ERP and Ecommerce. Thousands of customers globally have switched from a variety of other combinations of accounting, Ecommerce and sales force automation packages. For more information about customers who switched, please visit www.netsuite.com.au/customerswitch.

The software applications utilised by traditional companies are not seamlessly integrated to allow business processes to run across front and back-office functions. These companies have to operate separate, incompatible software packages to run their business—one for accounting, one for warehousing, one for sales force automation and one for customer support. Additionally, the costs associated with managing the software and integrating data from those incompatible systems are high. Even though software vendors try to integrate their stand-alone offerings with other point solutions using XML and Web services, the patchwork that results is integrated only on a rudimentary level and has a number of additional disadvantages including:

• Data Synchronization: Synchronizing data reliably between multiple incompatible applications is a continuous nightmare. What happens in the accounting application if a user deletes or edits a contact in the separate sales force automation package? Does it get deleted/edited in the accounting application? Even this simple business process shows the extreme complexity of data integration, and the vagaries of individual software applications make the challenge even more vexing. Take for example the combination of Intacct and salesforce.com. Intacct uses a model where virtually nothing can be deleted and many things are un-editable once they've been used in a transaction. This causes huge problems with integration where the salesforce.com application allows deletes/edits essentially without restriction.
• Look/Feel: Crucial issues such as user interface and application navigation are driven independently by each application, forcing a user to learn two separate ways of interacting with each system, thereby decreasing productivity.
• API Changes: Integration has been notoriously susceptible to code changes that affect the application programming interface, and the world of Web services has the same issues. When one application changes its API or Web Service for a new version, the existing integration will often fail.
• Support: When a customer has a problem with their patched together integration of multiple systems, who do they call for support? This issue typically becomes a major finger-pointing exercise between each application vendor with neither vendor taking responsibility, forcing customers to attempt to solve the issue on their own time and dime.
• Maintenance Cost: Vendors are quick to gloss over this point, but with any application or integration where custom software needs to be written, it also needs to be supported, maintained and updated—an exercise that typically requires dedicated resources to ensure that business processes continue to function even at a basic level.
• Business Visibility: The rudimentary integration that results from tying together separate ERP and CRM systems will provide at best a snapshot in time. They don't provide the real-time view into business performance, which is essential to staying competitive and effectively managing and growing a business.

Not only do integrations of multiple systems patched together typically fall short of what vendors promise, but they are also more costly than a single application like NetSuite that is built as one system. In a recent report by Yankee Group examining the cost of integrating CRM and ERP applications, NetSuite's offering was significantly less expensive over a three and five-year period when compared to a combination of stand-alone CRM and ERP systems. Interestingly, the study chose as its benchmark the combination of SalesLogix and MAS 90, which are both owned by Sage Group (LSE: SGE.L). If a company that owns both applications can't provide cost-effective integration, two applications written by completely separate vendors will be even more expensive to integrate and deliver less functionality when integrated, regardless of whether the applications are hosted or on-premise.

"There's no magic wand to wave to deliver meaningful integration between business applications that weren't designed to work together," said Evan Goldberg, NetSuite Co-founder and CTO. "It doesn't matter if you are delivering an ASP product or stone-age client-server software. The integration challenges are the same."

Companies that have switched from salesforce.com are driven by the power of a single system as well as the superior sales force automation (SFA) features found in NetSuite. A recent report by Forrester Research (Source: Forrester Hosted CRM Tech Rankings) ranked NetSuite as the leading application in the most important functional areas of SFA including Forecasting, Opportunity Management, Activity Management, Dashboards, Document Management, Pricing & Products, and Queries.

Customers who have switched to NetSuite include the following:

Brivo Systems, Bethesda, Md., previously used salesforce.com and Peachtree: "We had previously been using salesforce.com and Peachtree, but on January 1 of this year, we switched to NetSuite," said Brent Stidley, Director of Administration and Controller, Brivo Systems (www.brivo.com), who provides access control systems for governments, schools and other entities, large and small. "We were able to get rid of the two packages that didn't talk to each other, and now we have everything under one roof. With NetSuite, we enter our information first during the sales process and don't have to enter it again elsewhere."

MediaBound, Stamford, Conn., previously used salesforce.com and was in the process of trying to implement and integrate with Intacct: "We had been using salesforce.com for sales and were in the process of moving to Intacct for accounting, but we switched to NetSuite to have everything—our accounting, sales force automation, customer support, marketing automation and even our Web presence—all integrated in one application," said Justin Calvillo, CEO of MediaBound, a marketing logistics and spend management company. "Besides eliminating the silos between our front and back office, we chose NetSuite to help us build our business. We didn't feel we were giving up anything in terms of the Customisation capabilities we had with salesforce.com. On the contrary, we saw that NetSuite was putting more money into development of their NetFlex platform than into mere events and marketing of their product."

Fieldglass, Chicago, Ill., previously used salesforce.com and QuickBooks: "Our business offers a hosted software solution that helps Global 2000 companies manage key labor and services procurement processes. As such, we appreciate the fact that NetSuite gives us a fully hosted, integrated offering for managing our CRM and ERP systems," said Jim Holtzman, CFO of Fieldglass (www.fieldglass.com), an on-demand software application for services procurement. "Our previous accounting system was QuickBooks, an on-premise software that was not integrated with our salesforce.com product. As a result of our move to NetSuite, we now have one system to manage everything from the prospect stage to paying customer. As CFO, I can view the sales pipeline and its transition directly into the customer record without any barriers to cross. I can even access our company's information on the weekends or holidays from wherever I am."

BankServ, a San Francisco, Calif.-based Inc. 500 company that previously used salesforce.com and Great Plains: "Our business is growing rapidly world wide, and NetSuite's real-time access has allowed us to save time and money as we have been opening offices abroad," said Don Suva, CFO of San Francisco-based BankServ, an electronic payment software company. "In the past we had used both salesforce.com and Great Plains, but our sales reps and our financial team preferred one product for everything. We have saved about $25,000 in costs from Great Plains alone, not to mention the savings from being able to enter a sales order and generate an invoice from anywhere. That's something we couldn't do with salesforce.com."