Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: September 11, 2024
The News: NetSuite announced several enhancements to its ERP suite, focusing on embedded AI capabilities, product offerings, integrations, and user experience innovations and improvements. The new capabilities include several AI updates embedded across the suite, the availability of NetSuite SuiteProcurement, a new Salesforce connector, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro, Oracle Redwood Design System, NetSuite Guided Learning Managed Service, and NetSuite’s SuitePeople integrated benefits offering.
NetSuite Announces Significant New Product Innovations
Analyst Take: NetSuite announced a range of significant enhancements to its ERP suite at SuiteWorld. These focused on broadening the range and functionality of its embedded AI technology, providing new, function- and role-specific features, improving the user interface, and making it easier for workers to quickly and efficiently learn how to maximize the software. NetSuite also introduced a direct integration with Salesforce, recognizing the large number of customers that use both platforms.
Leveling Up AI Functionality
The announcement of a range of new AI functions that are embedded across the suite is welcome news for NetSuite users, as NetSuite was in danger of falling behind on the integration of AI features, compared with some of its rivals. Beyond simply being able to generate text based on contextual data (Text Enhance), NetSuite is incorporating AI-powered capabilities that detect financial exceptions, let users interact with data in new ways, and embed and customize generative AI in NetSuite extensions.
One of the most interesting enhancements is NetSuite SuiteAnalytics, which lets users ask questions of their data in natural language, leveraging generative AI summarization capabilities and recommendations based on the data in their workbooks and reports. This feature enables critical data and insights to be surfaced quickly, without the friction and complexity of traditional data query steps. The use of natural language to query data is rapidly becoming table stakes for ERP platforms, and it’s great to see NetSuite incorporating this feature.
Another interesting enhancement is NetSuite Prompt Studio, which lets admins and developers refine the quality of AI-generated content by configuring the format, tone, and creativity level of responses. This is critical for ensuring that AI outputs are accurate and match the style and voice of the organization, enabling them to be integrated within the flow of work with little additional editing or tweaking required.
NetSuite is also offering its NetSuite Advanced Customer Support (ACS) AI Playbook. This is designed to help organizations configure, optimize, and create new AI-powered capabilities throughout the suite. Many of its customers are relatively new to AI, and this playbook should help address time to value, a key success metric that is critical to both NetSuite and its customers, particularly as feature innovation cycles continue to accelerate.
New Solutions Streamline Internal and External Workflows
SuiteWorld was also marked by the release of several new solutions that are designed to streamline internal and external workflows across procurement, analytics, financial reporting, project management, and connections with external platforms. NetSuite SuiteProcurement is a procurement solution that incorporates automation to streamline purchasing approvals, order creation, invoicing, and reporting, while also providing access to preferred pricing and benefits from suppliers, including Amazon Business and Staples Business Advantage. Meanwhile, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is designed to provide organizations with the tools to accelerate data analysis and gain contextual insights with new embedded AI capabilities that can be applied to various business metrics and scenarios.
NetSuite also announced NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), a financial reporting solution, and NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro, an enhanced and revised project management solution. The extensive capabilities in these solutions expand the functionality of the core ERP system to ensure that the maximum value of the company’s data can be extracted and used across the entire organization to enable greater visibility, more relevant data predictions, and better recommendations for productivity, efficiency, and growth.
Increasingly, companies are trying to reduce the number of disparate solutions they use to handle critical business functions, reduce security liabilities, streamline data management, and better control costs. These new solutions from NetSuite address the challenges by incorporating critical functions within the suite. However, the announcement of a new Salesforce Connector that enables bi-directional data flow between the two platforms is a welcome acknowledgment that a true, single-vendor environment is unrealistic, and meeting customers where they are is the right strategy for ensuring customer satisfaction.
Interface Improvements Drive Greater Efficiency and Reduce Friction
Technology investments can only drive results and returns if workers are able to utilize them efficiently and easily, without a massive learning curve that impacts time to value. NetSuite announced it will be rolling out the Oracle Redwood Design System to NetSuite in the near future. Redwood offers an intuitive, modern user experience across the suite, and will be rolled out to NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro, Customer 360, and to the entire NetSuite application starting with the most widely used areas of the suite such as dashboards, lists, and forms to further enhance productivity.
Similarly, NetSuite announced it was building on the features incorporated in NetSuite Guided Learning and offering the NetSuite Guided Learning Managed Service, which provides step-by-step guidance embedded in NetSuite that is tailored to a customer’s unique business processes. The solution incorporates an evaluation of users’ activities within the suite to create analytics reports, which can be used to further tailor training and refine the guides themselves, helping to ensure teams are using the suite’s functions effectively and improving the overall time to value.
NetSuite’s Enhancements Bring Enterprise-Grade Functions to All Types of Businesses
Ultimately, the plethora of new features and enhancements announced at SuiteWorld reflect the hard work that has been going on within the company and at its parent, Oracle. I was somewhat underwhelmed at SuiteConnect New York in March, where much of the focus was on the relatively limited scope of generative AI features that were generally available.
However, NetSuite’s innovations have clearly addressed many of my concerns about whether the suite had the potential to meet organizations’ desires for a full-featured, robust platform that goes beyond basic ERP functionality, and truly embeds new technologies such as generative AI.
The biggest challenge I see for NetSuite, and really any other ERP platform vendor, is making sure that it is serving as a trusted partner to its customers and ensuring that they have the right data management strategy in place to take advantage of these features. While larger organizations may have that figured out to a large degree, some organizations – particularly those that have relied on bespoke or home-grown solutions – may need significantly more support and education to ensure its data is available and accessible.
You can read the release detailing all of the new announcements at NetSuite’s website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
