NetSuite launches SuiteAnalytics for powerful business intelligence with Excel-like formulas
SuiteAnalytics Gives Businesses of All Sizes Real-time, Actionable Business Intelligence—Without Data Warehouse
LONDON and SAN MATEO, Calif.—June 21, 2007—NetSuite, Inc., the leading on-demand vendor of integrated business management application suites for small and medium-sized businesses, or SMBs, today launched SuiteAnalytics, bringing business intelligence to growing businesses without the complexity, time and cost required by traditional data warehouse systems. SuiteAnalytics integrates pre-built dashboards and pre-configured key performance indicators with powerful new customizable analytics capabilities—including for the first time the ability to embed Excel-like formulas in any NetSuite Performance Scorecard or saved-search report. Best of all, SuiteAnalytics is currently included in all NetSuite software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings at no charge, delivering powerful business analysis that is easy enough for any executive, line-level manager or individual user to leverage. For more information about NetSuite SuiteAnalytics please go to www.netsuite.com/suiteanalytics.
Companies have struggled for decades trying to tie together their disparate software applications to manage their businesses. If they are able to assemble a series of solutions to address a business process, they often cannot get cohesive information they can trust out of the resulting menagerie of packages. This forces them to try and build data warehouses by which they can attempt to consolidate, rationalize, and time-synchronise the data for analysis, a resource-intensive, costly and error-prone process that can cost millions and result in marginal business benefit. In addition, the data warehouses are accessible only by a limited number of business analysts who know the "magic" proprietary programming language or procedures to extract the data from such systems.
"NetSuite delivers integrated business management with a cost-effective delivery model—software as a service—to growing and mid-size businesses, said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. "SuiteAnalytics is a giant leap forward that lets users get real-time business intelligence—out of the box, at no additional cost to users, in a familiar format that is easy to use."
NetSuite's New SuiteAnalytics Changes the Economics and Accessibility of Business Intelligence
Because NetSuite acts as a central repository for the core business data of a company, it serves as a de-facto data warehouse. The new SuiteAnalytics tools provide employees at all levels of the company the power to mine the data—not with arcane programming languages in the following areas:
- Powerful new Performance Scorecard—highly configurable, this functionality allows Excel-like formulas to be embedded behind the calculation of the metric for easy at-a-glance analysis of key business indicators. Performance Scorecards can be built from the ground-up to fit a particular industry need or personalized business need and can leverage the full range of formula operators as their basis, ranging from simple mathematical calculations—such as add, subtract, multiply and divide—to complex analysis involving functions such as UPPER, LOWER, TRIM and ABSOLUTE to name a few.
A handy function and metric selector takes the guesswork out of building formulas, while providing an expanded text-area to enter and view the complete formula details in Excel-like fashion. Performance Scorecards also facilitate comparison between different date ranges of the same calculated indicator (ex: Pipeline Coverage over 30, 60, 90 days) on the Dashboard for easy analysis of where the business stands.
- A built-in Financial Ratios Scorecard—gives executives the real-time and historic operating ratios they crave to effectively run their business and manage for growth. The Financial Ratios Scorecard includes metrics that are built using embedded formulas against core NetSuite data providing insight into key business drivers such as Days Sales Outstanding, Asset Turnover, Profit Margin on Sales and Debt to Equity ratios.
- Ability to include formula-driven criteria in saved searches as an easy-to-use analysis tool—the same powerful operators available in Performance Scorecards can be leveraged for building formulas in saved search and can also be embedded in the resulting data set. In addition, statistical functions such as group, count, average, min and max can be applied to search results for easy data summarisation, and summarised data sets can have highlighting and formatting applied to call attention to rows with images or colored text when threshold criteria are met. Finally, these search-based analytics can be emailed on-demand to users on an automatic, scheduled basis for desktop and mobile access.
In addition to these new analytic capabilities introduced, SuiteAnalytics serves as the delivery platform for these existing business intelligence capabilities of NetSuite:
- Dashboards—Operational Intelligence: NetSuite Dashboards with Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Trend Graphs, graphical Report Snapshots and KPI Meters can drive individual productivity by providing every person in the company with the real-time intelligence they need to make day-to-day decisions smarter and faster.
- Reporting—Tactical Intelligence: Standard Reports, Custom Built Reports, and point-and-click Search-as-Analysis tools give users clearly defined focus areas as well as tactical decision support on a periodic or as-needed basis. NetSuite's wizard-driven, WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) graphical Report Builder makes it simple to create and manipulate reports to exact business requirements.
- Third Party Business-Intelligence—Strategic Intelligence: For more complex, forward-thinking business planning or industry-driven reporting needs, ODBC connectivity lets companies link to their choice of business intelligence packages (e.g. Business Objects, Cognos, and more). The NetSuite advantage here is that a 3rd party Business Intelligence (BI) package is drawing data from a single data repository (NetSuite) for consolidated, rationalized analytics resulting in more confident business intelligence.
Pricing and Availability: SuiteAnalytics features will be available with NetSuite 2007.0 in the standard NetSuite service which rolls out to customers from June to August 2007. NetSuite starts at $499/month and $99 for each user per month. ODBC connectivity to 3rd party BI packages has an incremental flat fee of $399 per month.
For more information about NetSuite, visit: www.netsuite.com.
NOTE: NetSuite and the NetSuite logo are service-marks of NetSuite, Inc.