NetSuite boosts property portal's expansion

Singapore

FLEXIBLE cloud-based business management solutions are allowing many SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to expand rapidly, not only in Singapore but regionally.

San Mateo, California-based NetSuite is a leading provider of enterprise-class cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions to SMEs and divisions of large enterprises. A recent Gartner study named NetSuite as the fastest-growing top 10 financial management systems vendor in the world.

Speaking to BT, Reginald Singh, NetSuite vice-president for sales in Asia, said that globally more than 20,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes in the cloud.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the company has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Apart from PropertyGuru, NetSuite counts Asics, Bloom and Grow and Jollibee among its major customers. The company's Asia headquarters is based out of Singapore.

NetSuite has more than 1,000 employees across the Asia-Pacific and a growing partner ecosystem in the region, with key partners in Asia including MSaaS in Singapore, Aashna in India, Introv Limited and Vantis Solutions in Hong Kong, Hitpoint Solution in China and CloudTech and PGE Solutions in the Philippines.

Mr Singh said NetSuite's OneWorld product supports more than 190 currencies, 19 languages, and country-specific accounting standards in North America, Europe and Asia.

The company's primary verticals in Asia are in services, distribution, manufacturing and retail.

Mr Singh noted that the "unique flexibility" of NetSuite's solution makes it a great fit for a wide variety of businesses and "we have customers from many other verticals such as airlines, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), software and media and publishing companies".

He added that cloud computing is transforming entire industries and is now firmly in the mainstream.

"Singapore continues to make strong strides towards cloud adoption, spurred by government initiatives. As businesses in Singapore focus on productivity and efficiency, they are realising that running their business on systems that were developed prior to the Internet age is just not practical and that the cloud is best positioned to give them the competitive edge that they need," he said.

"Beyond infrastructure and supporting functions such as CRM, storage and e-mail, businesses in Asia are increasingly moving their mission-critical operational and financial management systems to the cloud with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription model."

One of NetSuite's clients is real estate portal PropertyGuru, which has deployed a cloud-based business management solution to accelerate its expansion across the Asia-Pacific region.

The company started operations in 2007 and now has 300 employees across four countries and it has tripled its revenue over the past three years.

PropertyGuru operates in four countries - Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand - and NetSuite's OneWorld solution supports the company in each of these locations.

Jani Rautiainen, co-founder and managing director of the PropertyGuru Group, said the online property portal is used by more than 10 million people viewing more than 90 million property pages and generating over 400,000 enquiries for real estate developers and agent advertisers every month across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

The group has developed and launched 15 mobile applications in four countries and three languages.

"NetSuite has been supporting our growth by helping us to scale operations easily and also by providing necessary business visibility to guide the business as we grow. Also, we have been preparing for an IPO (initial public offering) and NetSuite has helped us to satisfy IPO requirements from a compliance point of view," Mr Rautiainen said.

He said PropertyGuru evaluated various vendors before choosing NetSuite. "The main things we were looking for were: 1) regional coverage in South-east Asia; 2) integrated system for CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP; 3) easily accessible system from regional offices and remotely by sales people (through the Internet); 4) ease of integration with other systems; and 5) something that doesn't take a massive implementation project to get started."

Mr Rautiainen noted that his company now has a system in place which can be used in all four countries and PropertyGuru continues to plug more business processes into the system.

"By implementing NetSuite OneWorld, we have slashed the time it takes for month-end close reconciliation from over a month to an average of 10 days," he said.

"NetSuite's financial management solution also gives us expense management, streamlined and auditable revenue management, as well as full integration with order management, inventory and CRM functions to enable all parties in our organisation to work from a single source of finance, sales and customer data."

He added that the system is easy to use and the company is able to bring new users on board quickly.

"Going forward we're rolling out NetSuite's platform across our operations and consolidating other disparate systems, and we plan to use NetSuite to drive best practise processes. In the future, we will also be able to roll out to new countries with lower IT costs as our system is already in the cloud."

Mr Rautiainen added: "The good thing with a SaaS system is that you get upgrades automatically and avoid big upgrade projects. NetSuite does releases every six months with new features and we instantly get them."