NetSuite: 10 things you should know for 2020

Whether you’re a business owner preparing to expand your company, or a NetSuite professional ready to pursue a well-deserved promotion, it’s time to make 2020 your year. To help you out, here are 10 things happening in the NetSuite ecosystem in 2020.

1. SuiteLife

At last year’s SuiteWorld, NetSuite announced the launch of its new partner engagement initiative, SuiteLife. This is the most substantial investment NetSuite has made in its partner ecosystem, and it will encompass an array of NetSuite Partner Programs, affecting more than 550 partners in 85 countries.

SuiteLife aims to supply partners with innovative new offerings to expand their NetSuite practice, as well as provide the capability of selling and delivering NetSuite software to customers in under 90 days.

2. A financial management tool that can do it all

NetSuite is integrating a more sophisticated global financial management tool into its software to enable global, as well as localized trade across China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, and the U.K.

3. Integrating the Bronto Marketing platform

In 2015, NetSuite acquired Bronto for $200 million to help enhance its existing line of commerce products. But within the year, Oracle announced its intention to buy NetSuite for $9.3 billion. Because of the Oracle acquisition in 2016, Bronto became less of a priority and was never fully integrated into NetSuite.

Last year, however, Jason Maynard, Oracle NetSuite SVP of global field operations, stated that Bronto has become more aligned with NetSuite, and insinuated that the integration would be a primary focus throughout 2020.

The email marketing platform, Bronto, will be integrated into the SuiteCommerce program and is designed to drive commerce by linking email campaigns to the client’s ROIs and KPIs.

4. Introducing the SuiteCommerce Blog

The SuiteCommerce software is designed for SMBs that need a user-friendly platform with everything in one place, and NetSuite has made that possible with the help of its third-party application. Nevertheless, the Cloud ERP experts have gone one step further in their latest features update by introducing a SuiteCommerce blog extension for their customer’s database.

The blog extension allows business owners to create a blog seamlessly, and categorize them using the system’s site management tools. Users will also be able to customize their blogs through images, rich text, and post previews.

5. Anderson Frank Salary survey

Our fourth-annual NetSuite Salary Survey offers a unique insight into the NetSuite ecosystem, with respondents given the opportunity to have their say on NetSuite products, salaries, benefits, and working culture.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a NetSuite professional or a business owner who uses the software; your experience allows us to gain an understanding of the vibrant and dynamic NetSuite community, so we can help others gain valuable knowledge on the NetSuite industry.

6. Expanding budget and planning capability

NetSuite announced its aim for the next year is to bring more KPIs into their platform. The firm recently introduced its new planning and budgeting service, featuring a more user-friendly interface to give customers visibility and the ability to tie industry benchmarks to their KPIs.

7. NetSuite 2020 Release 2

NetSuite 2020 Release 2 is the second major platform upgrade of the year, and aims to help companies and professionals to navigate the challenges ahead and position themselves for future success.

Delivering new functionality to customers, the update will create greater visibility when it comes to financial operations, and keep employees engaged as they navigate new supply chain challenges.

Here are just a few things to look out for within NetSuite 2020 Release 2:

Financial and Operational Excellence

Invoice grouping enables the consolidation of multiple invoices into a single invoice that’s delivered to the customer. It also allows payments accepted at the group level to be applied to individual invoices. Elsewhere, bank reconciliations are streamlined with the added ability to automatically create and post transactions directly from imported bank data.

Continuous Employee Engagement

Available in North America only at the moment, SuitePeople Performance Management gives HR leaders a central place to administer performance review processes. It not only enables greater performance management efficiencies, but also helps employees stay engaged with goal creation, monitoring, measuring and recognition for achievements.

Autonomous Supply Chain

NetSuite’s new material requirements planning (MRP) capabilities for supply planning has been completely re-architected. Planners can easily monitor, confirm or release orders for approval and aggregation, while the planning workbench slices and dices data by product line, plan, location, user-defined item categories and groups.

The Power to Customize and Integrate the Platform

SuiteCloud adds a new records catalog that makes it easy to discover and view all standard and custom records and fields in your NetSuite account data model.

8. Suite Pro Bono

The Suite Pro Bono Project program matches the skillset of passionate NetSuite professionals with those of NetSuite social impact customers. Social impact organizations have an opportunity to apply for pro bono assistance quarterly. There are three types of project options available:

Discovery: Choose a specific element of NetSuite that you’re interested in exploring and consult with a team to understand how the functionality works.

Consultation: Receive detailed recommendations about how to address a challenge you are facing when utilizing your NetSuite software.

Configuration: Work collaboratively with individuals who will help you configure your system. Discover more about the program.

9. Hybrid Cloud Acceleration

Thanks to the success of cloud adoption over the last decade, SaaS ERP solutions have now dominated the market.

Many organizations that have on-premise ERP systems realize there are limitations to their operations, including inflexibility, costly scaling, and lack of innovation. As we enter the 2020s, the majority of businesses on the market are predicted to invest in cloud ERP.

However, the ERP industry isn’t stopping at the invention of cloud ERP; Finances Online pointed out that according to Accenture’s ERP trends report, a growing number of businesses are also opting for hybrid ERP solutions.

Hybrid ERP solutions are combining the strengths of on-premise and cloud-based ERP while covering for each other’s weaknesses. The hybrid ERP solution is the ideal combo for businesses focusing on products and assets, including companies in digital media and business service industries.

10. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

NetSuite will be utilizing resources of Oracle’s global cloud infrastructure to help its customers expand and take their business to new regions, with a reliable and battle-tested infrastructure.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has all of the advantages of the public cloud but also has the control and predictability of an on-premise system to deliver high performance and high availability.

NetSuite has already begun utilizing the OCI resources in Frankfurt and London and has had positive feedback from those who are live on the OCI database.

In the next 18 months, NetSuite will go live in a total of 18 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data centers across the U.S., EMEA, and JAPAC. By Spring 2020, NetSuite hopes to have 100% of new NetSuite customers in Europe on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Following the success of Europe, NetSuite plans to go live on OCI in four data centers in JAPAC—2 in Japan and 2 in Australia. As well as that, NetSuite is planning to have two data centers going live on OCI for its American markets early this spring.