SAP could find itself with a new competitor, NetSuite, which reportedly plans on developing new applications for enterprise customers. Formerly, NetSuite focused primarily on SMBs. Oracle is another company marketing software solutions to the enterprise that finds itself with a new competitor.
SAP
and Oracle
could have a new competitor in their space: NetSuite,
which reportedly plans on expanding the reach of its applications beyond
traditional small and midsize businesses to target the enterprise.
Called SuiteCloud Connect, the new NetSuite cloud-based applications would
theoretically allow corporate subsidiaries to run operations using NetSuite
software, before sending the financial data from those operations to the parent
company's data center, which would likely be running SAP and Oracle software.
According to Reuters, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his family own roughly 61
percent of NetSuite, although Ellison's direct stake has been put in a
"lockbox" company in order to avoid a potential conflict of interest.
Despite NetSuite jockeying for a larger slice of the enterprise market-share
pie, SAP publicly appears unconcerned about
the idea that corporate subsidiaries could dump their SAP
software for NetSuite offerings.
"We have thousands of customers running SAP
applications in their subsidiaries," Bill Wohl, vice president of global
field communications for SAP, said in an e-mail,
"and we intend to continue expanding the options we provide to them in
terms of packaged value, TCO reduction, and
fit to their complex and varied requirements that only SAP
can address."
Wohl added in a later interview, "What subsidiary companies want to do
is connect their business processes across the system; they want to be able to
run a business process. NetSuite is talking about leveraging data across the
system, but what customers are telling us is that they want a business process,
not a data exchange."
Resource Library:
"We do allow for business process connectivity," Mini
Peiris, vice president of product marketing for NetSuite, said in an interview,
defending the NetSuite product as "not about moving data around its about
automating the business process and tying the data back to [headquarters]."
This is not the first time that NetSuite has challenged larger players for
market share.
In June 2008, NetSuite
rolled out NetSuite for Manufacturers, targeting SMBs in vertical markets.
The SAAS (software as a service) solution allowed users to manage assemblies,
work orders, bills of materials and demand-based inventory replenishment.
Enterprise Applications 
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