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NetSuite to feast on bones of failed SAP Business ByDesign

SaaSman Zach Nelson offers a year of restorative SaaS at the low, low price of zero

NetSuite is waiting, vulture-style, for SAP Business ByDesign to stop breathing so it can recover some meat from the bones, according the chief executive Zach Nelson.

SAP announced last week that it will stop developing Business ByDesign, a cloudy business suite it hoped would help it to nip the Larry-Ellison-funded Netsuite in the bud. SAP won fewer than 1000 customers for the service, well short of its stated ambition to secure 10,000.

Speaking to The Reg in Sydney today, Nelson smugly said NetSuite has 16,000 customers. The CEO then offered SAP refugees that migrate to NetSuite a year without subscription fees and free data migration. “We will do whatever it takes to make SAP customers whole,” he said, pledging efforts to recover as much Business ByDesign customisation as is possible.

Nelson was crowing in a dignified way at the media lunch where he appeared today, an undestandable attitude after seeing off a titan. Prospective customers, he said, used to ask if they could trust the nascent NetSuite. Today the they ask “Can you trust the world's largest applications vendor?”

He also opined that vendors which dominate one era of computing never dominate the next, a rule from which he did not except NetSuite. For now he's trying to cement success during the cloud era, revealing enhanced unified billing features that will mean NetSuite customers will be able to blend subscriptions and more conventional types of invoices in future releases. ®

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