Callidus, Bazaarvoice Detail Their ROI with NetSuite

There’s been a persistent notion that the cloud hasn’t been ready to support enterprise-level ERP. Try telling that to Bazaarvoice and Callidus Software, two companies that have seen the rapid ROI that can be achieved with NetSuite ERP first hand.

Both companies were on hand at last month’s SuiteWorld 2014 gathering to share their experiences. For Bazaarvoice, those experiences have been varied.

The nine-year-old product review-sharing network has been running on NetSuite OneWorld since its relative infancy, a decision that has kept it off of the QuickBooks-Great Plains-SAP re-implementation treadmill that’s been typical of young, growing companies, Evan Trimble, the company’s financial systems administrator, told SuiteWorld attendees.

Since adopting OneWorld in 2008, Bazaarvoice’s revenue soared from less than $20 million to almost $180 million last year, its staff has grown from fewer than 100 to more than 800, it’s opened offices all over the world and its systems have scaled seamlessly in support of all of that growth. Along the way, NetSuite has helped the company simplify numerous tasks, from managing multiple legers to adding legal entities to performing reconciliation.

“The simplicity becomes your friend,” said Trimble. “It’s boring to talk about, except that it makes life a lot easier.”

That’s not to say there haven’t been issues. For instance, Bazaarvoice found itself in recent years having to compute back sales taxes, and while the company was able to use NetSuite for the international portion of that task, it had to turn to another tool to handle its more complex domestic computations.

The company also outgrew the limitations of NetSuite’s native support of ACH transactions, but adding NetSuite’s electronic payments module solved the problem, and then some. Bazaarvoice was able to start leveraging NetSuite’s saved searches to address its reporting needs, creating a report within the new module in two hours that saves the company’s accounts payable manager four hours every month.

What Trimble clearly likes best about NetSuite is that most issues can be addressed by adding modules or making changes within the NetSuite environment.

“We like to stay inside the applications we already have,” he said. “Integrations are expensive to build and expensive to maintain.”

Trimble’s co-presenter, Shamyo Chatterjee, didn’t need a reminder of that fact. Chatterjee, CIO of sales and marketing software-maker Callidus Software, remembers the pre-cloud days when his company was running on 14 disparate applications—software as varied as Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo and Neocase. In other words, Callidus, which was founded in 1996, was on the treadmill that Bazaarvoice managed to avoid.

“It was really a nightmare,” Chatterjee recalled for the SuiteWorld attendees. “We used to spend a lot of time just doing lights-on type of work. We were on call at night for almost 11 years.”

The nightmare ended in 2006, when Callidus decided to move both itself and its product to the cloud, and it subsequently turned to NetSuite as the engine that would power that migration and the company’s ongoing operations.

The company jumped in with both feet. It adopted OneWorld, OpenAir, and a range of modules, from CRM, financials and support to revenue recognition, recurring billing and T&E. It hasn’t looked back since, amassing 2,300 customers and 2.5 million users of its CallidusCloud suite in more than 160 countries, and growing revenue from $70.9 million in 2010 to $112.3 million in 2013.

What’s more, Callidus was able to complete eight mergers and acquisitions over the past three years, as well as build up its offshore development operation in India, all without adding to its IT head count, Chatterjee noted.
If it sounds like it’s been a wild ride for Callidus, it has. From completely redefining the company to enduring an historic economic downturn and, finally, to managing a period of great opportunity and growth, Callidus has relied on NetSuite to help keep the insanity to a minimum.

“Had it not been for NetSuite,” said Chatterjee, “I think our company would have had to overcome incredible hurdles.”

SolarWinds, MindJet Share Tips for Extending NetSuite

Getting NetSuite up and running is a speedy process that has been engineered to be both intuitive and painless from the start but that’s just the beginning. Once a business is live, there is the opportunity to ‘take it to the next level’ with workflows, scripting and other customization tools.

Dan Miller, general manager, software vertical at NetSuite, hosted a session at this year’s SuiteWorld to explain how NetSuite has been “vertical-ized” by customers for their specific use cases using NetSuite’s development platform.

Brian Dougherty, director of enterprise architecture at SolarWinds, explained how his company makes IT management software designed to eliminate complexity. The firm implemented NetSuite in 2006 and initially went live with financials before moving onto order management and processing functionalities. The company then began using SuiteTalk and SuiteScript extensively, while also using SuiteFlow to expand the functionality.

“Since we have been live with NetSuite, we have grown from 60 to more than 1,000 people and we are now in eight countries around the world,” Dougherty said. “From day one we customized the system using SuiteCloud to make the system work the way we wanted it to.”

SolarWinds built a ‘service tier’ to drive the transport of data between its systems and Salesforce.com, its CRM system. As a very cloud-centric company, all the virtualized data flows belonging to the company also went through this service tier.

“As an operational business concern, using NetSuite we are now driven by business considerations, not IT vendor performance,” said Dougherty.

Across its entire business structure, SolarWinds uses almost all of the SuiteCloud platform. Using a combination of event scripts and scheduled scripts, sales order approvals are pushed through its system and customer renewals quotes are sent out automatically. Quote reminders carry a link to a shopping cart so some customers are “completely touchless” in terms of the way SolarWinds bills them.

“If you are just starting out looking at NetSuite migration, then keep it as simple as possible to begin with,” Dougherty said. “But as you expand, NetSuite’s debugging environment is fantastic; so take advantage of the tools to help script with JavaScript development. Just remember to document, document and document throughout.”

Sudheer Yerabati, director, business systems and integration, MindJet, explained how his company implemented NetSuite for order and billing management in 2008. Operating a high volume business with multiple channels, MindJet used the SuiteCloud platform and migrated from Oracle Financials as part of its move to NetSuite.

Calling NetSuite one of its ‘anchor systems’ along with Boomi and Salesforce.com, today MindJet now passes orders from a web store to NetSuite via SuiteTalk. Multiple checks are made on each customer and scripts convert orders in NetSuite into cash sales.

SuiteTalk integration with a payment gateway handles reconciliation. A series of ongoing handshakes are made as the system looks at individual license key subscriptions with exception handling capabilities for failed orders.

MindJet started small but laid down a roadmap for continuous improvements. Yerabati insists that, “Use cases must be very well defined and it is important to customise after you find out what the platform can do out of the box.”

Scripting is used to automate business management, to generate contracts and to support multiple dollar values.

“Determine which systems hold the truth when working with multiple systems,” Yerabati said.