NetLedger Changes Its Name To NetSuite

After more than a year of shipping its flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP), CRM, and e-commerce product, NetSuite, NetLedger today announced it is changing its corporate name to NetSuite Inc. "NetSuite Inc. is a reflection of where the company has gone over the last five years," says Zach Nelson, president and CEO at the newly named NetSuite. With some financial help from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (currently board director of NetSuite), the company started out as NetLedger in 1998, selling Oracle Small Business Suite, a business application for small companies. In 1999 the company launched NetLedger, a Web-based suite of financial management applications. Last year, the company merged its expertise in ERP with customer facing CRM and e-commerce capabilities to form NetSuite. Today, the company has more than 7,000 customers. Separately, NetSuite introduced its latest platform upgrade, NetSuite 9.0, squarely aimed at wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. The updated version enables companies that make, move, or sell products with various stock-keeping units (SKUs) to automate much of the invoicing and billing process. Nelson cites an example of a shirt order, which includes shirts in different colors, sizes, and with different logos or locations for the logos. With NetSuite 9.0 Nelson says users no longer have to manually enter each SKU. This feature, he says, won NetSuite 20 customer deals even before the product started shipping. The product also has a commission management and payment feature, UPS integration for better view into product shipping, and integrated eCommerce capabilities. Early next year Nelson expects to ship a services version. This version, likely dubbed version 9.5, he says, "will not only measure time tracking but time billing for job costing." The upcoming solution, he adds, will enable users to bill on a monthly basis for an annual contract--a revenue-tracking feature that complies with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Most of NetSuite's customers are small and midsize businesses, and are not forced to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley until 2005.