NetSuite is pitching itself higher into the corporate ecosystem with a little help from data integration firm Informatica.
The two have announced a strategic partnership designed to allow staff in subsidiary offices to send key financial data from the NetSuite OneWorld system to their companies' main Oracle or SAP system.
With this two-tier approach, the existing on-premise ERP system serves as the hub at the enterprise level and is augmented with NetSuite’s OneWorld product at the subsidiary or divisional level.
The companies are also co-developing a connector, which will be available in the second quarter, that will tie departmental or divisional implementations of NetSuite's cloud-based OneWorld suite with a core on-premise ERP system from the likes of SAP or Oracle.
Informatica enables the exchange of data from NetSuite, including invoices, purchase orders, item fulfillments and shipments, journal entries, inventory adjustments, time entries and expense reports, and customer, employee, product and accounting structure information.
Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager of Informatica’s on-demand business unit, explained:
So what sorts of enterprises is this pitched at? A recent Constellation Research survey suggests that there's a rich seam to be tapped into here with 48% of respondents considering a two-tier ERP strategy, 27% up year on year. Constellation's Ray Wang notes:
For NetSuite the alliance gives it another weapon in its arsenal as it looks higher up the enterprise foodchain and at a time when arch-enemy SAP is gathering its own forces to come down into NetSuite's traditional market space. Dr Katy Ring of research firm K2 Advisory reckons:
