Evan Goldberg, Founder and EVP, Oracle NetSuite provided the keynote address at the SuiteWorld 2024 event. More than 7,500 visitors packed the Las Vegas venue (plus tens of thousands of online viewers) as Goldberg painted a picture of Oracle NetSuite’s landscape in a rapidly changing technological world.
Goldberg initially highlighted the company’s growth and expansion. Oracle NetSuite now has more than 40,000 customers, with 83 of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies using their services. The company is expanding its data centres to 36 in 17 regions, including India and Brazil.
The latest updates in NetSuite are expected to help customers detect financial exceptions, interact with data in new ways, and enhance and extend AI capabilities. Goldberg emphasised the importance of adaptability in business, comparing business survival in a competitive market to the natural world’s resilience.
Parallel with the natural world
Goldberg drew an interesting parallel between the Redwood Forests in California with Oracle Netsuite’s own product portfolio, and suggested overly complicated technology can slow, and even prohibit growth. “Growing business need to be like the trees in the Redwood Forest. An eco-system where the trees are interconnected with an all-encompassing root system.
“This allows them to literally share nutrients and communicate about the environment. Communication supports their growth which comes from the foundation. An interconnected root system that allows the forest to act as a single organism.”
Goldberg noted this was an incredibly compact, complex ecosystem where everything works together, leading to the beauty above the ground. Similarly, he suggested the business environment is complex, but with the right foundation, enterprises can achieve efficient growth.
“Oracle NetSuite designed its product suite to be that ideal foundation for growth. To connect the entire business and provide a platform for expansion. We started in 1998 with a vision of a single system to run an entire organisation, interconnecting every complex function in a way that feels simple.
“Over the years, we have continually updated this approach to make our solutions even more of a growth accelerator. With each advance, the system becomes more seamlessly integrated and informs the way organisations work, even as business evolves.”
Goldberg noted how AI is supercharging the ability of organisations to grow quickly and efficiently. “AI is that forest multiplier allowing Oracle NetSuite to make huge drives in advising and assisting businesses to reach their goals. The result – a NetSuite platform similar to the Redwood Forest ecosystem – alive and active, exchanging insights across functions. Working on customer’s behalf to pursue growth, suggesting actions that customers didn’t even think of. Advising how business can manage this complexity behind the scenes.”
A foundation for managing business growth
Goldberg highlighted the need for a powerful technology foundation to manage business changes and ensure growth. Additionally, he outlined four areas NetSuite has focused to support business growth in the future.
- Re-imagining the user experience to be a more natural extension of business processes.
- Providing businesses with a better overall bird’s eye view of their business.
- Automating more processes so employees can work productively and focus on what matters.
- Building on Redwood Forest analogy of developing a robust ecosystem where all elements work collaboratively.
Goldberg invited Hillel Cooperman, senior vice president, user experience (UX) design at Oracle to the stage. Cooperman spoke about how Oracle NetSuite reviewed its product portfolio, examining potential barriers that prevented users from getting the most out of their systems. As a result, NetSuite has changed its approach to user experience, embedding a UX-centric approach across its product portfolio.
Goldberg also unleashed a series of product update announcements and AI innovations across the product suite. The company says these innovations build on its AI capabilities, including generative AI, embedded in NetSuite. This includes new AI updates, a new procurement solution, new partner integrations, updated project management capabilities, user experience enhancements, new training resources, and an integrated benefits offering.
According to Goldberg, “We have designed NetSuite to be the foundation of business growth. We have a platform that can evolve and expand to meet changing needs and a data model that connects a customer’s entire business.
“We continue to extend NetSuite’s capabilities to further strengthen that foundation. As customers scale their businesses on NetSuite, AI innovations and workflow optimisations help them gain intelligent insights, improve productivity, and simplify collaboration.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for businesses
All Systems Grow was the headline for this year’s SuiteWorld event. Pursuing growth and ensuring businesses are ready to seize the opportunity was the real theme of the keynote address.
Goldberg made a really interesting comparison with the natural world – the Redwood Forests, home to the tallest trees on Earth. But Redwood is also part of a vast ecosystem of prairies, oak woodlands, wild rivers, and coastlines.
Similarly, enterprises gearing up for growth, embracing AI and automation as key starting points for growth, face an array of challenges. These include security, data integrity (key to ensuring the accuracy of AI innovations), economic headwinds, technical skills shortages and competition.
Achieving business growth is rarely easy. Having access to an efficient and effective portfolio of products such as Oracle NetSuite definitely helps. However, there are so many more activities, trends and actors required to sustain and manage that business growth.
