The Mid Market ERP community is in an uproar about the upcoming Oracle acquisition of NetSuite.
Oracle bought Netsuite for $9.3 billion, possibly a strategic move by Oracle, as it has always been trying to shift its business focus towards the cloud. The deal already seems to
have ventured into troubled waters. However, that’s a topic of discussion for some other day.
NetSuite is a cloud based ERP system for mid-sized companies. Oracle sells 100s of on-premise software applications to Fortune 100 enterprise companies. The two business models are entirely different.
ERP lifecycles are usually exorbitant and customers often express unhappiness over incremental costs that come with implementation and maintenance.
Top to bottom overhaul required
To change a $37B company from an on-premise model to a cloud-base model would require a top to bottom overhaul of the business model. New executives will need to be hired to develop strategies and make redundant those that cannot adopt. Expensive field representatives will need to be replaced with inside sales teams. Account management teams will need to be replaced with retention teams. High cost implementation teams will need to be replaced with configuration teams. Marketing will need to engage in a re-branding exercise.
During this transition, mid-sized customers probably will get injured. Field based sales representatives will call mid-sized corporate CEOs to buy any of their 100s of on-premise enterprise products. Inside sales will call those same CEOs to buy add-on cloud technologies. Account management will try to assure that same CEO that they own the account and will provide better offerings. Professional services will try to charge outrageous prices for their configuration capabilities. Marketing will provide content that might make the situation worst.
Is there room for confusion?
Mid-sized companies can neither afford products like Oracle nor get distracted by the confusion with the merger. These companies should look for integrated business applications like
Deskera’s fully integrated Cloud ERP Suite that include Enterprise Resource Planning (
ERP), Customer Relationship Management (
CRM), Manufacture Resource Planning (
MRP), Project Management (
PM) and Human Capital Management (
HCM). The application is a complete business suite that has all the features a mid-sized company will ever need to run their business.
Mid-sized companies should also seek a solution that will get them live in days and not months. The solution should be easy enough to use that implementation becomes more of a setup and training issue.
Mid-sized companies should stay away from the Oracle-NetSuite merger and seek alternatives today.
The views expressed are of the author and Techseen may not necessarily subscribe to them.
