NetSuite counts major e-commerce players Groupon, Zalora and Rebonz.com as well as Philippine-based Jollibee Foods Corp among its customers. The latter is one of the cloud-based financials and ERP software provider's largest customers in the region.
The quick service restaurant chain, currently expanding aggressively into the US, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei, has deployed NetSuite's OneWorld cloud-based ERP system to run multiple subsidiaries and multiple currencies in one system.
The solution has been rolled out across 265 stores in China and it took just two months to deploy the solution in 10 stores in Vietnam. Apart from reducing store re-stocking costs due to online supply ordering and real-time visibility across territories, the platform's multi-language support allows users in China to access information in Chinese while management sees the same info in English.
"We are going to add between 350 and 400 new customers in the Asia Pacific this year alone," said Mark Troselj, managing director of Asia Pacific at NetSuite. "We started our office in Singapore four years ago. In the last 12 months, we've grown from 6 to 15 people in Singapore. In Melbourne, we've grown from 1 or 2 people to more than 12 people [during the same period]. Our key areas of investment in the region are Singapore and Hong Kong."
"The benefits of cloud-based ERP solutions are becoming better understood throughout Asia Pacific, as over 30% of organizations with on-premise ERP solutions plan to move applications to the cloud over the next three years," said Andrew Milroy, vice president of ICT Research at Frost & Sullivan, which recently named NetSuite Asia Pacific's Cloud ERP Vendor of the Year for 2012. "NetSuite is certainly well positioned to take advantage of this shift in the industry."
Mixing business with e-commerce
A key initiative is its recently released SuiteCommerce, which supports subscription, usage-based, traditional commerce and pay-as-you-go models as well as multiple sales channels from smartphone or tablet right through to traditional brick and mortar stores.
Operating on the core NetSuite ERP and CRM applications, it enables commerce customers to track orders, customer issues and inventory and dispatch information from one place in real-time. Critical features for companies expanding or operating internationally are SuiteCommerce's multi-language, multi-site, multi-company, multi-currency and multi-country tax and compliance capabilities.