Thoughts from SuiteWorld, aka “Back to the desert”

I’ve been to Clark County in Nevada perhaps more times than is sensible – however, this was my first visit in the context of NetSuite’s flagship international event: SuiteWorld. 

What a trip. Las Vegas is a weird place, but for a business venue it works well. Yes, it’s on the other side of the earth from the Glorious North West™ of the UK, but for a ‘business’ conference you can get more done there in a few days than anywhere else – for the simple reason that there’s always a venue open and there are so many people to meet. Events kicked off on Sunday night, and then from Monday to Thursday we’ve been solidly booked from breakfast meetings, to lunches and dinners, with plenty jammed in between. 

In other circumstances, one might feel jaded (no sleep due to jetlag, clearing emails at 3am, endless conversations, plus a modest amount of alcohol) – but it’s been excellent. 

Why so? 

To give some context, this for me is the perfect event size. I believe there were circa 8,000 people there – which whilst that may sound like a lot, I’ve been to some with 40,000+, and that gets ridiculous. This was manageable, walkable, with plenty of opportunistic bumping into people. The Flamingo hotel maybe isn’t a top tier establishment, it’s well located and I’d probably stay there again next year for convenience. 

At a high level, the key themes for me were: 

1. Some superb product announcements. 
2. High quality partner meetings. 
3. Welcome evolution of the partner programme. 

(plus some confirmation on who the top partner in EMEA is!) 

and I leave feeling incredibly optimistic about the year ahead. 

There was also some skydiving before things kicked off. If you’re going to travel that far, you might as well have some fun, after all. 

Give me some detail 

Ok, let’s focus on the product as plenty of other conversations are under NDA.  

The keynotes were slick and well delivered. There was some Christ-like lighting at times, pumping baselines and even a small drone display – but really it was the product that stole the show, as should be the case. 

There were challenges and opportunities facing Oracle prior to the event. Both from the AI-mania that is sweeping the world, but also a selection of new product challengers who although have very little revenue, do make a fair bit of noise. I’d been hoping for a big statement from the market leader – and that’s what we got.  

Evan pitched “NetSuite Next” as the biggest announcement ever made in the 27 years of the company, split across 3 broad areas: 

• High quality AI functionality, built-in to all areas of the product 

• A great looking new user interface (including a much-cheered Dark Mode) 

• Significant performance enhancements 

Whilst the AI news will likely steal the mindshare, I really liked the UI shown and look forward to getting my hands on it. As with all such big announcements, General Availability will be staggered and take time. Some elements are already available (e.g. connecting external LLMs to NetSuite – which took Mr Ian Irwin 2 mins to setup with Claude), some will arrive in 26.1 next year, and some will take “12 – 18 months” to fully roll out around the world. Now might be a good time to set up a business in the USA if you want the earliest access…  

However, a clear gauntlet has been thrown down and the future looks bright. 

Evan repeatedly used terms like “single source of truth” and I think that’s now how to think about your ERP platform, with AI as the efficiency layer on top to help you get things done. As an example, in two keynotes they talked about the “autonomous close”, i.e. closing your books immediately at the end of the month/period, having used agents throughout the month to review and identify issues on an ongoing and proactive basis. 

On the AI side, I would particularly note: 

• Ask Oracle (interesting branding) for natural language requests. This is a game changer in terms of ERP interaction, rendering the menu bar pointless but more interestingly allowing complex queries to be expressed in the way that humans speak, and then further customised and queried from there. Think rich charts, drilling down, asking further questions – all inside the same platform and very well designed from what we saw. 

• SuiteAgents. A new framework for building agents on the platform, including workflow automation. 

• Developer Assistant, to build customisations from a written description, and document, test and deploy them. 

• ChatGPT Buy in Suite Commerce – that looked very slick, and I was impressed that had something to show, only a few days after OpenAI released it.

There are some short and shiny videos here if you’d prefer not to watch the full keynotes: https://www.netsuite.com/portal/products/netsuite-next.shtml  

What else? 

If you’re a tech business, take a look at Subscription Metrics - which looks like a great way to track the performance datapoints a SaaS business cares about – from LTV to CAC and all your favourite other acronyms.  

The updates to NSAW look great from a visual and interactive perspective – definitely worth exploring this if you’re interested in reporting and analysis. 

I liked the example of using AI for Subscription churn prediction – looking at a mixture of order volumes, payment trends, support ticket sentiment, etc. This is where AI can really help – by spotting things humans can’t - or don’t have time for.  

For businesses in LATAM, it feels like NetSuite is making a bet here on these rapidly expanding economies – with new data centres available in Brazil, and new localisations in Chile.  

Oh, and it was great to hear a NoBlue2 customer (Petlab) talk about NetSuite supporting their growth and driving month-end to be 80% faster to close. 

In closing 

Writing this on the way home, I reflect on a few of the stats quoted in the publicly available sessions: 43,000 businesses on the platform, 2M users, creating a $4Bn run-rate business.  

The future feels bright, perhaps as bright as some of the lights in the closing party from Pitbull – a man who I would note does not lack confidence in himself. With some apologies to the big dog, I’ll confess I watched a few songs and then exited stage left. I also owe the Las Vegas casinos an apology for gambling $0 once again. The theme of the event was “No Limits”. Turns out I have some. 

Until next time, Nevada…