Mid-Sized Companies In the Services Industry Switch From Microsoft Great Plains to NetSuite For CRM, Ecommerce and ERP /Accounting Software Suite

San Mateo, Calif. (PRWEB) August 19, 2008 -- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of on-demand, integrated business management software (http://www.netsuite.com/portal/products/oneworld/main.shtml) suites for mid-market enterprises and divisions of large companies, today announced the latest companies--all in the services industry--to switch from Microsoft Great Plains to NetSuite, largely to take advantage of NetSuite's unique integration of enterprise resource planning (ERP)/Accounting (http://www.netsuite.com/portal/products/netsuite/accounting-erp-overview.shtml), customer relationship management (CRM (http://www.netsuite.com/portal/products/netsuite/global-crm.shtml)), and ecommerce (http://www.netsuite.com/portal/products/netsuite/ecommerce.shtml) capabilities in a single on-demand application. These new customers, which include CMC Energy Services, Symbiot, Safir Rosetti, LLC, and Advantage Sign Supply, also cited advanced functionality and ease of use as the other compelling reasons for moving to NetSuite and saying good-bye once and for all to Great Plains' antiquated architecture and bloated cost model. For more information about these customers and why they switched, please visit www.netsuite.com/greatplainscantdothis.

"What drove us to NetSuite was both its lower cost and greater feature set," said Angelica Biehl, IT Support, Home Energy Tune-UP, a new national residential energy audit program of CMC Energy Services, based in Bethesda, Maryland.

"We needed our CRM data integrated with our accounting and ERP data, providing a complete solution to provide better all-around support to our customers. NetSuite provided more out-of-the-box functionality at a much lower investment on the order of thousands of dollars compared to the Great Plains-Microsoft CRM combination," continued Biehl. "NetSuite gives us everything in one system and it's Web-based, saving our residential program even more money because we don't need to invest in and maintain a client-server architecture like our parent company needed for Great Plains."

Older generation software applications like Microsoft Great Plains were once very popular within mid-sized companies. They are rapidly falling out of favor, however, due to a number of deficiencies. Most do not allow business data to move easily across departments, resulting in a lack of real-time visibility across key metrics needed to optimize business operations. In addition, companies that deploy best-of-breed applications like Microsoft Great Plains are forced to manage their business on separate on-premise software packages -- one for accounting, one for warehousing, one for sales force management and one for services management, an approach that requires costly integration to get them to work together. The cost of implementation, integration and on-going application maintenance in such environments can be many times the cost of the software itself. In addition, tying together disparate systems typically does not provide the integrated real-time visibility across business metrics that is essential to managing growth in a dynamic business environment.

In stark contrast to Microsoft Great Plains, NetSuite is designed to help solve the challenge of tying together these different systems because it is a single system for ERP, CRM and Ecommerce operations. In addition, NetSuite is delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), so not only is the cost of integrating disparate systems eliminated, but so too is the on-going cost of maintaining on-premise applications.

Thanks to NetSuite's SaaS delivery, businesses gain the added benefit of anytime, anywhere access which allows them great flexibility in expanding their business to multiple locations without the cost of installing on-premise applications, such as Microsoft Great Plains, in those multiple locations. This anytime, anywhere access is particularly useful to companies in the services industry since they typically have distributed workforces.

"After a little more than two years of using Great Plains and salesforce.com, we decided we really needed a completely integrated system to gain better visibility, so we switched to NetSuite," said Ray Jones, Senior VP, Infrastructure/Supply Chain Management, Symbiot. "The problem with Great Plains was that it didn't allow the operations group to view vendor- and customer-related information. With NetSuite's integrated platform, both our operations group and accounting group are much more effective and efficient without added costs of Great Plains licenses on top of salesforce.com licenses. Additionally, the ability to access our accounting information along with CRM data from anywhere in the country is a huge benefit for our company. We fully utilize the NetSuite accounting functionality as well as sales force automation and email marketing campaigns on a daily basis."

The companies that switched to NetSuite from Microsoft Great Plains include the following:

CMC Energy Services (www.hometuneup.com), founded in 1977, is a leading pioneer in residential energy services nationwide.

Symbiot (www.symbiot.biz), a leading provider of property services based in Draper, Utah, delivers multiple property maintenance services to thousands of sites across all regions of the United States.

Advantage Sign Supply (www.advantagesignsupply.com) has been serving businesses in the sign and graphics industry for nearly 20 years and today has over 90 employees and 90 users of NetSuite across 10 locations throughout the United States.

"NetSuite being all-in-one is the key," said David Jarrell, Director of IT, Advantage Sign Supply, based in Grand Rapids, Mich. "We've been using it for about six months now and it's drastically better than Microsoft Great Plains, which was too complex. With NetSuite we can purchase product, create orders for customers, and then ship, collect money and support those customers, and pay our bills. We can see more metrics across the business because we don't require integration with other systems."

Safir Rosetti, LLC (www.safirrosetti.com), is a New York City-based firm that provides industry and government clients worldwide with security, investigative, forensic, business intelligence, crisis management, and related services.

"The best thing about NetSuite is its ease of use," said Joe Chapman, Director of Finance at Safir Rosetti, LLC. "Great Plains required a lot of time, effort and help from external developer and consulting resources that added to the on-going cost of maintenance. We had to use separate applications with it and it wasn't smooth to pass from one application to another. With NetSuite, everything is integrated and we have real-time access across all our core business operations."

For information about NetSuite Inc., please visit www.netsuite.com.

NOTE: NetSuite and the NetSuite logo are service-marks of NetSuite Inc. Other marks are the property of their respective owners.

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