NetSuite takes One World view on consolidation

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Hosted business software vendor, NetSuite today announced new functionality aimed at helping growing mid-sized businesses manage their businesses globally, while maintaining local currency and taxation control.

As its first major release since the US-based SaaS provider floated on the New York Stock Exchange last December, chief executive Zach Nelson said its so-called 'One World' launch was as significant as its first product launch 10 years ago.

"One World is the next great catalyst for our company and our customers," Nelson said. "It is a significant development in the marketplace that takes advantage of NetSuite functionality in the cloud and enables midsized companies to run their subsidiary businesses around the globe in real time."

The new module is intended to complement existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce functionality of the vendor's existing hosted software package by allowing subsidiaries to manage their businesses locally, while providing a real-time consolidated view centrally.

In a demonstration, the One World module was used to view key, consolidated sales and financial performance indicators, such as profit and loss reports, across global subsidiaries. Meanwhile, central management could drill down to individual transactions in local currencies and with local taxation, as well as populate e-commerce websites with localised content based on the core item record in NetSuite's existing software product.

Nelson said many companies have previously had to resort to costly, lengthy ERP consolidation projects or business intelligence (BI) implementations to get a global, consolidated view of their business. "But even then, all you really get is a consolidated P&L [profit and loss] statement with zero drill-down capabilities," he added.

"There's been no magic dashboard where, as a chief executive, I know the source data is 100 per cent accurate and I can drill down to view that single transaction that might have screwed up the P&L."

The new One World functionality was made possible by fundamentally re-architecting NetSuite's database, so that multiple companies with different languages, currencies and financial regulations could be viewed as a single entity.

But Nelson was quick to stress that One World would not have been possible without NetSuite's original single instance, multi-tenanted architecture in tandem with the increasing adoption of SaaS over client-server alternatives for its lower cost and quick implementation benefits.

One World is available as an additional module to NetSuite's existing software packages for a flat-rate fee of $1,999 or £1,295 per month.

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