- Summary:
- NetSuite has expanded its analytics capabilities, tapping into two Oracle technologies in the process.
Customers want to be able to mash up their data sources as they grow and that’s a major driver behind NetSuite’s new NetSuite Analytics Warehouse (NSAW) offering that took center stage on Day One of SuiteWorld in Las Vegas.
NSAW is pitched as extending the capabilities of NetSuite SuiteAnalytics, as “the first and only pre-built data warehouse and analytics solution for NetSuite customers”. According to CEO Evan Goldberg:
This is addressing a number of needs that our customers have told us they have. They want to be able to pull NetSuite data into a warehouse...Most importantly, they want to mash it up with other data sources as they grow and they develop their own systems, and they use other systems. So that's what Analytics Warehouse is. It's really a comprehensive business analytics platform.
As per the official launch release, NSAW offers:
- Easy and secure data transfer with NSAW automatically connected to a customer’s NetSuite environment using prebuilt, secure data pipelines.
- Enriched analytics with third-party and NetSuite data with both generic connectors or 25+ pre-built connectors to the likes of Dropbox, Salesforce and Google Analytics.
- Ready to use role-based analytics, with pre-built metrics and KPIs.
It’s an enhancement that owes much to NetSuite being part of the Oracle empire, said Goldberg:
It's built on two major technologies from Oracle - the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, which is where the data resides securely, a super fast, super flexible database, and the Oracle Analytics Cloud, which provides all the analytical capabilities and everything that's necessary for data warehouse, such as airtight data integrity and security. That's all taken care of. And it's built for NetSuite.
It's super easy and secure data transfer. It's automatically connected to the NetSuite environment using pre-built data pipelines within minutes. Transfers of NetSuite data can be scheduled on an hourly basis, no more waiting for days to get your data. You can use all the power of the Oracle Analytics Cloud, all kinds of data visualizations. You can analyze historical data, spot trends and outliers, anything that you use analytics for to get those key insights that you need almost on an hourly basis.
But access to data from external, non-NetSuite/Oracle sources is also a critical asset of the new offering, he added:
Not only is it really easy to move your NetSuite data into the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, but we have great connectivity to extract, transform and load data from multiple sources. So these can be spreadsheets, these can be data for your business you build in your own database. There are also generic connectors, over 25 pre-built connectors to platforms such as Dropbox, Salesforce, Google Analytics, etc. This is really where the rubber meets the road. This is what our customers are asking for.
Customer approval
Goldberg said that numerous customers had been involved in the design process for NSAW, among them e-commerce firm Clickstop. Founded in 2005, Clickstop is now a $50+ million company that now sells a wide range of products across diverse industries, from hot pepper seeds and plants to cargo equipment. The firm’s own descriptor sets out the company:
At Clickstop, we've learned how to hustle, and we've learned how to stay a few steps ahead of the competition by thinking smarter, being resourceful and taking nimble leaps. We keep our eyes on the market, the competition, and our suppliers at all times.
The firm has made a series of acquisitions over the past decade, which expanded its footprint, but also rendered Clickstop’s financial and inventory management systems more complex and difficult to manage, to the extent that it was difficult to access business insights needed to make timely decisions.The company tapped into NetSuite to centralize ERP, accounting, and inventory management on a single platform.
As part of the NSAW beta program, Clickstop has seen an increase in the speed and accuracy of its data analysis capabilities, with an expectation that the new tech will help it produce reports 60% faster than before. That’s a major improvement on what came before, noted Tom Altman, Clickstop CTO, which was he said:
“Not a very good story, kind of a scary one actually. We've been on NetSuite since 2009, always kind of using the same searches as our data warehouse for a long time. You know, when everybody's doing their own thing, you get so many of them. So we started to work about four years ago on building our own data warehouse. We built that in a SQL Server database. It just wasn't working out right. We were leveraging Power BI, but it wasn't working for us.
When the pandemic hit, we found that some people were actually serving it off their desktop, so it became really difficult for us. That's when we heard about the new NetSuite data warehouse. We got signed up in the beta and we've been extremely excited about it ever since because of the real time. The hardest part that we've had so far is just the timeframe that it takes to get that data in. It's just not soon enough for us.
The ability to pull in third party data is hugely appealing, he added:
We are really excited about Google Analytics. We're excited to work harder on getting our Google AdWord data in because of all the digital marketing that we do. We just can't see it soon enough. It's all Excel spreadsheets mashed up. Everybody's doing it in a different way. We just want to get that in an automated fashion so that everyone can understand the data, as soon as possible.
We definitely want to Google AdWords. We want to look at our Amazon data because of course, like everyone says, there area lot of things there and then I think what I'd like to see as kind of big picture thinking is the Federal Reserve out of St. Louis has a lot of data available, like economic data. I think there's just a lot of things that we can leverage to see why some of things happen. So we could bring that data in too.
Image credit - SuiteWorld
Disclosure - At time of writing, Oracle is a premier partner of diginomica.
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