Oracle subsidiary NetSuite promises that new generative artificial intelligence capabilities inside its platform will help solution providers and end users cut down on costs and gain deeper insights from their data – all while avoiding privacy concerns that might arise from working with the largest cloud vendors.
These are some of the highlights from Austin, Texas-based NetSuite’s SuiteWord 2023 conference.
Solution providers will remain an important go-to-market motion for NetSuite looking ahead, vendor, channel chief Craig West told CRN in an interview.
New NetSuite GenAI Capabilities
West – whose formal title is vice president of alliances and channels – told CRN that “there’s not a market where we’re not looking to grow partners” because partners “help us get into industries or other functional areas that we don’t otherwise get into without their industry expertise, their IP (intellectual property), and other things.”
West said the announcements can help some NetSuite partners who have historically focused on enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools expand into new markets such as enterprise performance management (EPM) and analytics.
“All the investments we’re making in the technology to expand what we can do for the customer, we need our partners to take advantage of that,” he said. “It’s just such a great growth opportunity for them in their businesses. … They can now build out adjacent practices, which enable them to really grow revenues, as well as provide more valuable ongoing services to their customers and secure more of the wallet share.”
Paul Farrell, Oracle NetSuite vice president of product management, told CRN in an interview that data security and privacy will serve as differentiators for NetSuite as the GenAI race heats up.
“Data needs to be seen as much of an asset as a machine on the shop floor,” Farrell said. “Companies sometimes abandon that asset. They give it to Amazon or they give it to someone else to learn how they do business. And I think one of the key things is it’s not so much how they’re going to use the data and protecting that. If you’re a NetSuite customer, then that’s all going to happen anyway.”
Users who trust large cloud vendors that compete with the user in other areas open themselves up to letting the vendor “understand how you sell, how you price, how you interact with your customers,” Farrell said.
“Which might be fine, but if that’s your secret sauce, then you’ve just given it away,” he said.
NetSuite has about 880 channel partners worldwide, about 300 of them in North America, according to CRN’s 2023 Channel Chiefs.
NetSuite has more than 37,000 customers across 219 countries, according to the vendor. In its parent organization’s latest quarterly earnings, Oracle reported that NetSuite Cloud ERP brought in $700 million during the three months ended Aug. 31. That was up 21 percent year over year.
NetSuite’s GenAI capabilities are built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – which hosts pre-built and custom models – and respect customer enterprise data, privacy and security, according to the vendor.
No customer data is shared with large language model (LLM) providers or seen by other customers or third parties, according to NetSuite. Individual customers are the only entity allowed to use custom models trained on their data.
Sensitive information about customers are protected through role-based security embedded into NetSuite workflows, according to the vendor. Only content individual users are entitled to view is recommended.