In the world of CRM and other related SaaS designs, Salesforce and the general Force.com service repertoire get a lot of attention and praise because of the extensive app exchange system it offers to keep adding features to the system ad infinitum. This has caused people to judge it apart from competitors, which causes things like Netsuite to have a hard time getting attention. But, people must not know about Netsuite Openair, because if they did, they’d realize that it, too, can integrate with other services strongly.
Netsuite Openair is an extension service based on the Openair PSA and SRP service. While Netsuite itself has a very solid CRM service as well as a solid basic financial system comparable to FinancialForce, there hasn’t, previously, really been a breed of extended functionality quite like this before.
Managing resources such as overhead, man hours, wages, and other resources on fiscal time tables, with reports generated automatically is something that can make your life a lot easier.
In the past, this required manual handling of data from CRM and BI, and book keeping, and tabulate an expense expenditure table and measurement system from there. Spreadsheet software was more or less invented to facilitate the manual way of handling resources, and over the years, it automated more and more.
But, with SaaS, a very specialized PSA and SRP solution is practical, and tying it in with a high quality set of services like Netsuite is both a bold move and a rather clever one.
While Force.com solutions have had their own PSA and SRP solutions created as fly by night extensions, Netsuite gets the slick, brand name service to integrate with here.
But, does it work the way it claims? Can it track time, resources, expenses, and do invoicing and report generation off of Netsuite’s CRM and financial service data? And, does it do this either automatically or at most with a simple button click?
The answer to this is a resounding yes. There’s not a lot more to say about it than that it does indeed do all of these things just as well as it would be expected to. The significance of this is that Netsuite is starting to see a lot of stuff being designed for it, either as app extensions, or as interoperability plugins like this, to tie in unity with all other solutions at hand.
This means that Force.com had better step up their game, because it looks like Netsuite is starting to match their acceleration curve. This is just one of the more interesting ones out there right now, and in the near future, if the rumors are true, there will be a whole number of new service integrations with Netsuite. The rumors around this are numerous, including claims that an equivalent of the app exchange for them is on its way by the end of next year as well.
For now, though, Netsuite Openair is a good tool, so even setting aside the implications of its existence, it’s worthy of investigation. Netsuite was in need of functionality like this, and it was one of the detriments to their service in comparison lists all over the internet.