6th July 2007

NetSuite IPO

posted in Technology, Business |

The Ponderings of Woodrow writes about the upcoming NetSuite IPO. He points out a couple of interesting down-sides of this offering- Even after the IPO, Larry Ellison will own a majority stake, they have only one data center and no redundancy support for their clients, etc.

I have some experience with NetSuite from the Pure days. Granted this was over a year ago, but NetSuite was a disaster. They sold us a bill of good promising that we could use their service for our ecommerce and that they were providing a flexible platform we could build on. It turned out to be the typical vapor-sale. They had no platform that you could integrate your own apps with in any meaningful way and most of their own infrastructure was immature and not ready for anything but the most narrow scenarios that they had built for. Given the market they are in, hearing things like their lack of any redundancy beyond that one data center is totally consistent with our experiences.

All that I can say is that I’m amazed that a company like that can IPO. Its pretty clear that its only kept afloat on Ellison’s money and name.

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There are currently 2 responses to “NetSuite IPO”

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  1. 1 On July 13th, 2007, Walter Sumil said:

    It is obvious that you have not read the entire S1 and are basing your opinion on one experience. Not to make light of your experience, but you have only told your side of the story. Complex implementations require a commitment from both parties. I would be interested to hear specifically what issues you had, if you purchased implementation assistance or if you decided to try to do it on your own.

    If you take a moment to read the entire S1 and note the % of revenue increase year over year, you will see why investors are intrigued by this offering.

    Also, just an FYI on the redundancy point. Salesforce only had one data center even after their June 2004 IPO. They have since added another one. Salesforce is barely profitable even after 3+ years of being a public company.

    Back to my original point. Please provide readers to this site a more detailed description of what you purchased from NetSuite. Buying just a license does not always guarantee success.

  2. 2 On July 24th, 2007, Alex said:

    Very true, my opinion is based on my own (limited) experience. I don’t think I tried to imply that I had the absolute truth about NetSuite, only that I found their offering failed to meet our needs, and to be clear that their sales-people implied it could do much more than it actually could. This was well over a year ago so its possible they morphed into a totally different company now, but in my experience that rarely happens.

    It also shows some of the difficulties of the SaaS model in acting as a true platform that can support developers building on it as opposed to out-of-the-box solutions. There is a ton of excitement over various consumer mash-ups, but few examples of SaaS platforms that can support mission-critical needs over a longer time period. Building true platforms is hard work.

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