NetSuite SuiteWorld 2023: The Biggest News

NetSuite Text Enhance, Analytics Warehouse updates and GenAI capabilities are part of announcements.

Oracle subsidiary NetSuite promises that new generative artificial intelligence capabilities inside its platform will help solution providers and end users cut down on costs and gain deeper insights from their data – all while avoiding privacy concerns that might arise from working with the largest cloud vendors.

These are some of the highlights from Austin, Texas-based NetSuite’s SuiteWord 2023 conference, which runs through Thursday in Las Vegas and online.

Solution providers will remain an important go-to-market motion for NetSuite looking ahead, vendor, channel chief Craig West told CRN in an interview.

New NetSuite GenAI Capabilities

West – whose formal title is vice president of alliances and channels – told CRN that “there’s not a market where we’re not looking to grow partners” because partners “help us get into industries or other functional areas that we don’t otherwise get into without their industry expertise, their IP (intellectual property), and other things.”

West said the announcements can help some NetSuite partners who have historically focused on enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools expand into new markets such as enterprise performance management (EPM) and analytics.

“All the investments we’re making in the technology to expand what we can do for the customer, we need our partners to take advantage of that,” he said. “It’s just such a great growth opportunity for them in their businesses. … They can now build out adjacent practices, which enable them to really grow revenues, as well as provide more valuable ongoing services to their customers and secure more of the wallet share.”

Paul Farrell, Oracle NetSuite vice president of product management, told CRN in an interview that data security and privacy will serve as differentiators for NetSuite as the GenAI race heats up.

“Data needs to be seen as much of an asset as a machine on the shop floor,” Farrell said. “Companies sometimes abandon that asset. They give it to Amazon or they give it to someone else to learn how they do business. And I think one of the key things is it’s not so much how they’re going to use the data and protecting that. If you’re a NetSuite customer, then that’s all going to happen anyway.”

Users who trust large cloud vendors that compete with the user in other areas open themselves up to letting the vendor “understand how you sell, how you price, how you interact with your customers,” Farrell said.

“Which might be fine, but if that’s your secret sauce, then you’ve just given it away,” he said.

NetSuite has about 880 channel partners worldwide, about 300 of them in North America, according to CRN’s 2023 Channel Chiefs.

NetSuite has more than 37,000 customers across 219 countries, according to the vendor. In its parent organization’s latest quarterly earnings, Oracle reported that NetSuite Cloud ERP brought in $700 million during the three months ended Aug. 31. That was up 21 percent year over year.

NetSuite’s GenAI capabilities are built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – which hosts pre-built and custom models – and respect customer enterprise data, privacy and security, according to the vendor.

No customer data is shared with large language model (LLM) providers or seen by other customers or third parties, according to NetSuite. Individual customers are the only entity allowed to use custom models trained on their data.

Sensitive information about customers are protected through role-based security embedded into NetSuite workflows, according to the vendor. Only content individual users are entitled to view is recommended.

Here are some of the biggest announcements out of SuiteWorld 2023.

NetSuite Text Enhance Introduced

NetSuite Text Enhance promises the ability to create and refine contextual and personalized content for finance, accounting, human resources, supply chain, operations, sales, marketing, customer support and other use cases.

Finance and accounting employees should have new ways to expedite collections, close books faster and accelerate writing tasks. Supply chain and operations employees can streamline purchasing and logistics while improving product-related communications. And HR employees can write job descriptions and requisitions faster, according to NetSuite.

For sales and marketing, Text Enhance promises more personalized email content for marketing campaigns and sales pitches. And customer support agents can respond to reviews and online commentary and create escalation notices for internal use, among other examples.

The AI-powered capability is supported by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)’s generative AI (GenAI) service and embedded across the suite, according to the vendor.

OCI leverages supercluster, which combines bare metal compute, Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and the Oracle remote direct memory access (RDMA) network in the cloud.

Upcoming NetSuite Analytics Warehouse Features

NetSuite will release updates to its Analytics Warehouse offering over the next 12 months, according to the vendor.

The updates include analytics embedded in user dashboards, more frequent data refreshes and enhanced analysis of financial data.

The embedded analytics allow users to add links to visualizations from Analytics Warehouse to NetSuite dashboard for better metrics tracking and to access charts based on data in NetSuite and other systems.

Users can schedule data refreshes by frequency and time. And the new financial analysis subject area shows activity from different angles and incorporates more business systems data. A new budget subject area also allows for more resource allocation tracking and adjustment, according to NetSuite.

Along with these updates are new line-level details for sales order and inventory analyses plus new Single Sign-On (SSO) to NetSuite and Analytics Warehouse.

Users also gained more roles and dimensions for allowing certain users to view dashboard charts without underlying transaction detail, according to NetSuite.

EPM Unveiled

Within the next year, NetSuite will make its Enterprise Performance Management offering available in North America.

EPM unites planning, budgeting, forecasting, account reconciliation, financial close and reporting processes across the organization for better business visibility, decision-making and growth, according to the vendor.

EPM adds planning and budgeting features for finding trends, anomalies and correlations. Narrative reporting capabilities allow- finance employees to collaborate in a central space to add context to financial data, management reports and regulatory reports. And tax provisioning and compliance options within EPM can centralize all tax-related tasks to a dashboard and help divide up responsibilities and prioritize tasks.

EPM includes capabilities from NetSuite Account Reconciliation, launched in July to improve the close process and automate financial data aggregation tests.

NetSuite will continue to sell a separate Planning and Budgeting offering and Account Reconciliation offering along with including the products as part of EPM, according to the vendor.

NetSuite built EPM on the foundation of Oracle’s own Fusion Cloud EPM, according to the vendor.

New Licensing Model

NetSuite plans to open up a new licensing model with task-specific licenses for employees who don’t need full access, according to the vendor.

The first task-specific license is for NetSuite Warehouse Management, which should only grant warehouse employees NetSuite access for receiving, picking, shipping and other functionality without needing a full subscription.

Other task-specific licenses are expected in the future.

Field Service Management Debuts

At SuiteWorld 2023, NetSuite debuted a Field Service Management product.

Field Service Management promised field-to-office communication improvements with a simple scheduling and dispatch and automating inventory management, according to the vendor.

The product also allows for customer asset management automation and more real-time data visibility.

SuiteCommerce MyAccount, CPQ Enhancement

NetSuite has made the SuiteCommerce MyAccount product available for customers in the United States and United Kingdom.

SuiteCommerce MyAccount promises organizations better self-service and online account management, according to NetSuite. Customers can pay invoices, convert online quotes to sales orders and manage subscriptions.

The product also allows for repeat purchases.

Meanwhile, a new NetSuite CPQ feature aims to help users sell customers subscriptions by adding the option to SuiteBilling.

NetSuite Benchmark 360, Bill Capture

Benchmark 360 is a new tool from NetSuite that aims to help organizations analyze operational and financial metrics compared to similar organizations in their industry and region.

The tool should help customers with insights and recommendations on how to improve business performance, according to NetSuite.

Videos and white papers are part of the available content, according to NetSuite. Benchmark 360 can also recommend better ways to use parts of NetSuite itself.

Meanwhile, NetSuite Bill Capture promises users the ability to capture and categorize expenses based on historical data.

This AI-powered capability should eliminate manual bill entry and improve accounting team productivity, according to NetSuite.

NetSuite Pay, Capital

At SuiteWorld 2023, NetSuite showcased a new digital payments service and a cash flow and days sales outstanding (DSO) service both embedded in the platform.

NetSuite Pay can help users simplify application and onboarding for new merchant accounts, according to the vendor.

Users can integrate services from payment processing providers with pre-negotiated rates and fees to improve payment processing transparency, according to NetSuite.

NetSuite Capital promises ways to accelerate payments and increase working capital with invoice reviews, pricing and submission.

Meanwhile, NetSuite Electronic Invoicing, powered by Avalara, is a new service meant for improving payment and cash collection, cost reduction and streamlined global invoicing compliance.

Users can connect to national and international networks from within NetSuite, according to the vendor.