In a week or so I’ll be making my regular trans-Pacific commute to the Bay Area, this time I’ll be attending NetSuite’s first ever user conference, SuiteWorld. As Vinnie pointed out, this is;
NetSuite’s first global customer event. You have to admire their discipline – many vendors have one even before their first year in business. NetSuite has been in business 13 years. With everyone starting to hype cloud computing it will be good to hear from pioneering executives like Evan Goldberg and Zach Nelson. They have forgotten many of the things most other vendor executives are just starting to learn
I’m especially excited about this event for three distinct reasons.
SuiteSocial
At an event in Sydney last year, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson let slip about SuiteSocial, a social offering that, in Nelson’s words will;
…take a similar approach to Chatter and allow “data points, not just people, to be social”
While SuiteSocial was meant to launch in Q1 of this year, I’m fully expecting an announcement, and immediate beta-availability of the product directly after SuiteWorld. The last six months have seen a lot of movement in this space – salesforce’s Chatter has gone general availability, Tibbr from Tibco has launched to raucous acclaim from many of my colleagues, and Yammer, despite the competition, continues to make inroads into enterprise.
A Real Customer Event
SuiteSocial, as mentioned previously, is the first NetSuite customer conference – after 13 years I’m really looking forward to hearing what Nelson and co-founder Evan Goldberg have to say to their customers – there’s a lot of notches in the NetSuite belt and, unlike their competitors at salesforce, they’ve not had an opportunity to really sing customer stories at one global event
My Panel
NetSuite has asked me to take part in a panel that really is close to my heart. Along with friend and colleague Michael Krigsman (Enterprise commentator and ZDNet blogger) and Dan Feely from TSI, a company that performs independent ERP solution searches for clients. We’ll be talking on the subject of “Trends in Cloud Computing: The Road Ahead.” I feel we’re at a perfect stage in the evolution of Cloud ERP for this talk – things are well enough field tested to be finished with the “is it viable” discussion and now to be moving on to the “where to from here” discussion. I’m really looking forward to the dialog with my fellow commentators.
Overall SuiteWorld is going to be a really interesting few days – I can’t wait!
Disclosure – NetSuite comped my travel and expenses to attend SuiteWorld
