NetLedger's Fall Lineup

What do Matt LeBlanc and NetLedger's ERP functionality have in common? Both are expected to go from supporting roles to starring in their own lead roles. The "Friends" costar will return next year on NBC with some new friends in a sitcom dubbed "Joey," and NetLedger will make a similar move with its ERP functionality from NetSuite to form its latest solution, NetERP. The ERP functionality will link to NetLedger's Web hosted e-commerce capabilities to provide customer, vendor, and partner views of the business transactions. The company is also previewing various new features for midsize product distribution companies, including serialized inventory, bar coding, units of measure, quantity pricing, UPS integration, and matrix item management. These features will be available to existing NetSuite customers on August 1, and will be generally available in September with the launch of NetERP. "We are bringing the cost point down to offer large enterprise functionality to SMBs," says Zach Nelson, president and CEO of NetLedger. This is in response to a trend Nelson says is supported by the desire of large vendors to be able to complete B2B transactions on the Web. "Large vendors are telling smaller partners, 'We want to do business with you online,' " Nelson says, suggesting that it has traditionally been too costly for smaller companies to integrate e-commerce transactions into back-office applications. "Now they can get the e-commerce capabilities integrated with the back-office ERP processes for free with NetSuite," Nelson states. Users can gain visibility into customer accounts and transactions through the NetERP dashboard--a tool originally offered in the NetSuite solution. The NetERP dashboard, which offers a new quantity-based pricing feature, enables users to track various information, including customer leads, order status, and inventory levels. "Instead of blindly making promises to customers, you can check the status of inventory in real time," says Sean Rollings, senior director of marketing at NetLedger. By providing a view into inventory levels, users can take advantage of cross-sell and upsell opportunities by suggesting related items to customers when an original item is out of stock. NetERP can automatically offer customers special pricing discounts based on their customer profiles to move products off the shelf, providing e-marketing capabilities similar to Amazon.com, Nelson says. Pricing for NetERP will start at $4,800 per user, per year; each additional user will be $75 per user, per month. This entitles users to 250MBs of storage. More storage is available at $1,500 per year for every 2GBs increment. In the spirit of turning a supporting role into a starring one, the goal for both LeBlanc and NetLedger, naturally, is to attain "Frazier" 's success.