SuiteWorld – Netsuite-Birst partnership confirmed in raft of technology announcements

As predicted, Netsuite’s co-founder, CTO and chairman, Evan Goldberg, announced at the company’s SuiteWorld conference in San Jose that the company had struck a new partnership deal with BI analytics visualisation specialist, Birst.

The announcement came as part of a raft of new technology developments presented to the 6,000-plus delegates by Goldberg.

Business Intelligence is becoming one of the important extensions to the core business management, ERP and ecommerce capabilities available with the Netsuite service, and the company has made some significant updates to its initial move into the BI and analytics area with SuiteAnalytics.

These updates, Goldberg said, have been designed to make SuiteAnalytics more unified, flexible and easy to use.

“The idea is to make Netsuite a data store for the whole business, including external data outside of that generated using Netsuite,” he said.

The upgrade uses unified technology based on SuiteSearch and Reports. The aim is to make it easy to work for business users, yet powerful enough for power user analysts to work with. He acknowledged that a core issue is the fact that different businesses have different information requirements, so Netsuite aims to make end user optimisation as easy as possible.

It will also allow the inclusion of external, third party data so that businesses can run a much wider range of more general analyses, such as comparative analyses against markets or competitors.

Despite being CTO and happiest when developing new code, Goldberg accepts that Netsuite can’t develop everything and often makes use of partners. This is the case in the area of analytics. The partnership adds the latter’s specialist capabilities in not just analytics but the visualisation of the results. Using the system, business managers can not only see the overall picture of the state of the business very quickly, but can also drill down to identify the detailed causes of business problems both quickly and effectively.

As part of the new partnership Birst announced that, as of today, any Netsuite customer can have access to a free licence for a trial period.

As well as unifying the BI and analytics processes, the company also announced its latest efforts in building Unified Customer Experience Management. This includes providing tools to manage content through all the possible customer segments, such as those that are regular, promotion driven, recent purchasers and the like.

IT also features brand new site management tools that allow content to be moved around web pages as required, as well as the building occasional additional resources, such as special promotion sites.

The latest developments in SuiteGL are designed to transform General Ledgers, from a one size fits all approach to GLs that can become a custom business asset. It provides three new capabilities: custom segments that allow financial reporting to be customised, custom lines, that allow the tailoring and addition of ledger lines by using plug-ins built in SuiteScript, and custom Transaction Types for building special journal entry systems.

New SuiteFlow Templates and a new 2D editor provide the tools needed to allow rapid building of new workflow schemes and diagrams, making it easy and fast, while SuiteCommerce has been updated with full featured shopping, and check out management capabilities. This also allows for the management of invoice payment, including partial payments, and the building of lists of regular product purchases.

The new User Interface announced by CEO, Zach Nelson, yesterday, has been redesigned for a modern company. The objective, Goldberg said, is to make it more intuitive and easy to use.

The additions include a general revamp of the design, with new typefaces, and the inclusion of hidden, pop-up panels that reveal additional services such as the portlets available for individual users. Many of these have been designed to give users more reassurance on the progress of processes, such as providing explicit save confirmations on-screen.

Goldberg said that the development team continuies to look closely at mobile devices. It is now on third version of Netsuite for the iPhone, and now there is Netsuite for Android.This, he suggested,  will include some features not available on the iPhone version, such as a new expense receipt tracker. This is expected to appear in early 2015.

Users can also expect developments in the area of Netsuite for tablets. Both Apple and Android versions are coming, and will probably be followed by a Microsoft version later.

Many of these new developments will see the light of day for users in the imminent 14.2 release of Netsuite.