Oracle NetSuite Emphasizes ‘Very Active Partner Program’ with Vertical Focus

ORACLE NETSUITE SUITECONNECT — More than three years after being acquired by Oracle in a $9.3 billion deal, NetSuite continues to build on its partner relationships and channel program by improving its channel products and services, and helping to bring in more customers.

While Oracle is holding its huge annual Oracle OpenWorld conference here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week, the company’s NetSuite division also is hosting its own smaller SuiteConnect conference in the adjacent Marriott Marquis hotel, where customers and partners are hearing about NetSuite’s latest attributes.

NetSuite’s founder, Evan Goldberg, who has been the executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite since it was acquired, said channel partners play a huge part in the company’s success as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

NetSuite’s Evan Goldberg

“Fundamentally, we think that one of the greatest value-adds that the channel can bring is expertise about a particular market,” Goldberg said during a journalist’s forum at the conference.

The company has been working to narrow its focus to target NetSuite for a wide range of specific vertical markets, including apparel, food and accessories, health and beauty, as well as industrial supply, but all of them together cover just a small percentage of the company’s overall market, he said.

“We see even narrower great segments for resellers to become experts in. That’s how you get the best experience with NetSuite for your industry,” he noted.

For increased channel success with the platform, the company must continue to enable it to be easily customized by channel partners to meet the needs of their customers, he said. Those customized versions can then be distributed by channel partners to their customers as resellers.

“Maybe you have 100 customers in three different vertical markets, and you have three different extensions or sets of extensions that you’ve built for NetSuite,” said Goldberg. “Managing all that, developing that, that’s what we’ve been focused on for years from the minute that we added the first custom field.”

The beauty of NetSuite, he said, is that it is the best destination for partners with great development ideas that can be put it into code.

“They can put it into customizations or workflows … distribute it to their customers, manage it and maintain it so they make changes and it goes to all their customers. That’s all enabled by us. We’re trying to enable mini-NetSuites among our channel and that’s a big part of what we are doing.”

NetSuite’s Jason Maynard

Jason Maynard, NetSuite’s senior vice president of global field operations, agreed, saying that the company is 100% aligned with the channel partner business model, from resellers to systems integrators and everyone in between.

“We have substantially increased our investments in our channel partners over the last couple years,” said Maynard. “We’ve rolled out all sorts of new enablement and training programs. We’re investing more as well to help them on go-to-market efforts. We’ve had a huge uptick in interest in becoming part of that channel ecosystem, whether it’s a reseller or someone who wants to implement NetSuite. From day one, everybody who is in that ecosystem will have the same access.”

Maynard said the company has been working hard to ensure that channel partners …