Moving to the Cloud can be used to tackle the problem of 'hairballs'. That's the term used to describe the plethora of cobbled together and disparate IT systems that can all too easily sprout up inside organisations.
This week's NetSuite Suite Cloud event in San Francisco took a dim view of hairballs and highlighted customers who had consolidated on a Cloud solution to remove them. "We recognise those who have coughed up their biggest on-premise software hairballs and are now reaping the benefits of Cloud Computing business management suites,” said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite.
Among the companies that have coughed up their hairballs were:
Campus Living
Campus Living Villages develop and/or manage over 40,000 beds internationally. It says its aim is 'to provide students with not just a home, but a lifestyle. We consider our developments to be ‘villages’ because they offer students more than just a bed. Each Village features a wide variety of specially designed activities and facilities ranging from fitness and health to culture and entertainment'.
“We are a student accommodation company,” explains Melissa Montgomery, Director of Financial Reporting. “We provide housing on campus as an extension of university housing programmes. Sometimes universities don't want to build additional residences, so they look to partner with the business community. We develop and manage the properties for them and operate in the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.”
“We are working through our hairball. The main issue that we've tacked to date is that we were running real estate software that varied form country to country so that we had separate databases for each of our subsidiaries. In the US alone we have 97 subsidiaries. When we tried to consolidate information we were having to deal with 40 different databases and more spreadsheets than I could count. And when you work with Excel and the links break then it's a disaster.
“We're all on one system one, one general ledger and so on. We are bringing revenue management data in to NetSuite now. The next project is to an automatic integrated of that data into NetSuite. Everything is now managed in OneWorld.”
MYCOM
MYCOM is a privately owned, leading global provider of OSS Service Assurance software solutions and innovative ICT engineering services to the telecoms industry.. Since its inception in 1997 MYCOM has executed projects in more than 30 countries covering EMEA, APAC and the Americas. Today, MYCOM has 11 offices in 3 continents and some 500 employees of more than 26 nationalities and languages.
“We operate in a dozen different counties, all of which have been running different systems,” says Calvin Jackmann, controller at Mycom. “We were running Sage 200 in the UK and Peachtree in the US for example. We did consolidation once a year at the end of the year so that we could do the audit. That audit would then take a year or two to get done. We had a big problem in trying to get the books consolidated and our tax returns and financials filed. It's now all consolidated on Netsuite. We can do the audit in a couple of months now where it would have taken a year or two before.
Redbuilt
RedBuilt is a leader in the design, manufacture and support of patented engineered structural wood products for commercial applications. Headquartered in Boise, Idaho, RedBuilt operates four manufacturing plants and 13 design and sales offices throughout the United States.
“We are a manufacturer and supplier of re-engineered wood products,” explains Dallas Anderson, IT director. “In our hairball, we had SAP for finance, PeopleSoft for payroll. We had been on NetSuite CRM for an number of years so NetSuite could be considered part of our hairballs.
“We have now consolidated on NetSuite. We have 220 users of NetSuite across ERP and CRM. We can take an entire department of people and put them to value added work rather than having them as internal waste. We've also been able to streamline our reporting. The total cost of ownership with NetSuite is nearly $300 lower than it was with SAP. Our first year costs with NetSuite was half of what RedBuild would have spent with SAP.”
RedBuilt
Posted by SophieK on Mon, 19/04/2010 - 06:24With all this Tea Party business going on (even though the original concerned import duties, not an actual income tax) and since tax day is passing by, I wondered just how unfair US taxes are. When it does send some running for pay day loans, for OECD countries, we really pay very reasonable taxes. The UK pays 50% of income, within the US the tax scale tops at 35%. Many European countries don't protest about their taxes as loudly - and I discovered that they drink more beer than we do per person per year. So it logically follows that if the Tea Party protesters drank one a lot more beer per day, they wouldn't be as agitated.
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