Oracle NetSuite isn’t worried about chasing pack leaders in submarkets like CRMdespite its stake in those areas, said the firm’s GVP of strategy.
In conversation with TechRadar Pro at SuiteWorld 2022Jason Cowan answered questions about the company’s ability to compete with Salesforce in the CRM market, as well as single-product vendors in other segments covered by its platform.
“After all, the core of Salesforce is CRM and the core of NetSuite is ERP finance,” he told us. “I don’t think that means we have to go after Salesforce to create a best-in-class CRM. We can have a very compelling proposition for many industries without saying we have to win in every market.”
Greatness in the “apartment”
Although NetSuite is a powerhouse in the ERP market, it plays second fiddle to Salesforce specifically in CRM. Similarly, Salesforce is rapidly expanding outward beyond CRM – into areas such as e-commerceanalytics and so on – in such a way that there may be implications for NetSuite.
However, Cowan is confident that by drawing on his heritage in finance, his strength in cloud and the relationship with Oracle from an infrastructure perspective, NetSuite will continue to increase its market share.
At SuiteWorld, NetSuite is still eager to highlight its recent investment in CRM. In particular, the company launched a new CPQ service designed to facilitate the configuration, pricing and quoting of products with a high degree of accuracy. But the real emphasis is on finance and accounting.
“We’ve invested in our CRM with new sales dashboards and additions like CPQ, which is probably one of the biggest CRM upgrades we’ve done. [But our primary focus] is about empowering finance teams by improving visibility and insight into cash flow, costs and profitability.”
The same message was echoed earlier in the week by James Chisham, vice president of international products, who explained that NetSuite “may not be able to do everything.”
“We can’t be all things to all people. That is very difficult to achieve,” he said TechRadar Pro. “If we look at finance as the backbone of what we do for our clients, building on that is critical. It’s about improving those processes, removing some of the pain and manual effort.”
Both executives also suggest that NetSuite derives significant advantage from the interconnectedness of its suite of products, an attribute the company describes as “convenience.”
“What we’ve always tried to do is leverage the strength of our package in a unified way. And separately, we’ve always been happy to have a rich ecosystem of partners that fills all the gaps for us, covering areas that we don’t cover,” Chisham added.
The key to deepening that value proposition, according to Cowan, will be to address topics like data visibility, machine learning and user interface improvement in the coming months. While he was unable to provide us with details, the suggestion was that NetSuite still has a few tricks up its sleeve.
https://www.techradar.com/news/why-netsuite-isnt-bothered-about-chasing-salesforce-or-any-other-competitor/
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