The announcement came as a surprise, as NetSuite has always been perceived as a close ally of Oracle. Let’s dissect the news. (You can find the press release here): MyPOV - It’s always good to see vendors listening to their customers. Though NetSuite does not state it explicitly, this may well be a customer driven partnership. Regardless, the scope of the partnership is something that NetSuite needs to work on - as Office365 is a given for its customers. Same for Windows. Azure is more interesting - more below. MyPOV - Promising quote by Nelson: The ‘fluid cloud environment’ or seamless integration across all cloud properties is, indeed, something customers want to see. MyPOV - Good assessment by ‘Guggs’ - Microsoft partner enablement executive. NetSuite is a great partner addition for Microsoft overall partnership portfolio. Kudos to Guggenheimer for being specific about the details of the partnership. More below. MyPOV - Using Azure Active Directory is probably the low hanging fruit here - but it creates value for customers. NetSuite administration costs will go down, and Microsoft will get more enterprises to use Azure Active Directory. Microsoft knows that once AD is in Azure, all things will get easier from there. Available immediately, an integration between NetSuite and Azure Active Directory that enables single sign-on (SSO) for customers using NetSuite together with Azure Active Directory, eliminating the need for users to manage and use multiple passwords. The integration also gives administrators centralized control of user authentication and password management while enabling organizations to strengthen role-based approaches to business management. Built using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, the integration reduces the security risks of user-managed passwords while providing additional protection against phishing and other threats. MyPOV - NetSuite cannot avoid the demands of its customers using Office365. It’s this analyst’s opinion that when you have to do something, it’s always better to it sooner than later. Last week at Build (my event report here), Microsoft showed simple, elegant ways to integrate business applications (Salesforce and SAP) with Office365. The integration of PowerBI and Excel is a good move for both vendors, and creates BI value for their joint customers. Microsoft wants content for PowerBI and NetSuite needs compelling visualization. Netsuite moving its employee base to Office365 is a nice cherry on top for Microsoft. MyPOV - Honestly, I had some trouble understanding this sentence - but my understanding is: NetSuite is moving test and development environments from AWS over to Azure. This is a key win for Azure, allowing it to catch up a little to AWS. This release does not mention where NetSuite runs production - which is a larger and harder engineering problem to address. But Azure runs Oracle, so what is not happening today is something that could happen tomorrow. If NetSuite can offload its datacenter Capex onto a partner like Microsoft, Netsuite products will benefit. We see Infor playing this card successfully (only with AWS).
My Overall POV
A win / win for both vendors’ customers. I’m looking forward to seeing how NetSuite and Microsoft will cooperate around Windows (10 we assume). The net: Microsoft gets more AD usage and more Azure load. NetSuite customers get an easier path to test and development environments by avoiding AWS. For both sides, Office users will benefit from a tighter integration between their enterprise system (NetSuite) and better BI and visualization with PowerBI.
