ERPodcast goes to CFO Leadership West 2023 The ERPodcast

E30 CFO Leadership Conference West 2023

 E30 CFO Leadership Conference West 2023

ERPodcast Episode 30.2

Intro MFX

This week in ERP….(or at least my week in ERP)

Hey Folks – Gene Hammons, Director of ProfitFromERP with Episode 30 of the ERPodcast…

Interesting week however you look at it - locally, here in AZ, Tempe to be specific, the CFO Leadership Council held CFO Leadership Conference West 2023 - thanks to my friends at Oracle NetSuite and Avalera (the tax guys) they were able to sneak me into the Networking Event held poolside at one of the local mountainside Marriott Resorts. And fortunately, fall came to the desert three days prior to the event and it was a great evening under the stars. A week earlier and it would have been 103 degrees with the smell of roasted CFO’s wafting across the desert.

Got to talk to a lot of different CFO’s from lots of different companies all across the country. I’d say attendance was in the 200-400 range, but that’s a guess on my part. A lot of the sessions were on technology for finance, using automation in driving better data and how data driven organizations had clearer and faster reads on how their specific company was performing in a wildly fluctuating market. It goes without saying that we’re dealing with challenging market conditions these days. Makes me wonder if it goes without saying, why do I keep saying it.

We’re beginning to see real functionality with AI in finance software – more on that next week – Many CFO’s report their staff spending more time on accuracy than analysis, and the focus here was using automation to drive the accuracy, AI to report anomalies and staff can concentrate on analysis to provide real service to the rest of the organization.

Many of the CFO’s were with companies already using NetSuite - and the new numbers are out, NetSuite is now over 37,000 companies using the Suite. I remember 2019, not that long ago, when they were ecstatic at breaking the 18,000 companies mark. The conventional wisdom at the time was NetSuite had seen 30% growth year after year but driving 30% increases of a 10k customer base is a lot easier to achieve than pulling off 30% growth on a base of 18,000 customers - so surely there was a ceiling coming soon. Execpt it didn’t….and here’s a few reasons why

The Oracle Boost – I don’t know if you know the NetSuite history, initially, Larry Ellison Oracle Founder and CEO, provided once Oracle employee now NetSuite Founder CEO Evan Goldberg with initial funding to start a cloud based business software – so Larry owned a good deal of the stock in NetSuite. Oracle, for reasons we’ll cover other places, wasn’t a big player in cloud technology, but as NetSuite grew, Oracle could shortcut it’s way into cloud technology by acquiring NetSuite – which turned out to be really great in many areas.

Going Global

2019 I also was at a NetSuite Suite Success Training in Denver . We heard that Oracle, was driving huge development dollars into the NetSuite platform.  I first saw NetSuite really take off in our customer base around 2014, back then, NetSuite was a US market product.

As I met my fellow Suite Success team members in Denver, I met other students from Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Ireland, London, Paris, Germany, Thailand-I think, India, Sri Lanka - and that’s the ones I remember. That kind of illustrated the global impact NetSuite was starting to have in foreign ERP providers and global markets with Oracle-backed development rolling out NetSuite versions specific to other countries, localized to tax and legal issues of those particular markets - that was part of the new development Oracle was providing - driving new markets globally, so NetSuite could replicate the tremendous success they’ve had stateside and start serving a worldwide market. And that’s just some of the huge expansion of NetSuite capabilities and functionalites