The Accounting Podcast

Hi there. Blake here with another bonus episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast. In this interview recorded at the 2021 SuiteWorld Conference, David, and I talked with Joav Bally, and Marc Holliday about data analytics and specifically the new NetSuiteAnalytics Warehouse, which promises to help NetSuite companies get all of their financial and operational data in one place to generate new insights that were not possible previously. I hope you enjoy.

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:33] Welcome to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:35] I'm David Leary. Blake, we are now at day two of SuiteWorld-

Blake Oliver: [00:00:38] Well, day two for us.

David Leary: [00:00:39] Day two for us. For some people, it's day three, or day four of a massive conference here, and we have two more guests to interview. We have Joav Bally. He’s the Vice President of Product Management of NetSuite BI Analytics, and Marc Holliday, who's a Senior Product Manager for the HCM. Marc, HCM is ...?

Marc Holliday: [00:00:58] Human capital management, and I also work with the analytics solutions, as well.

David Leary: [00:01:03] The analytics solutions, as well. Got it. We're happy to be here. For us, this is a big learning because we're used to — we live down in the down market a little bit, and it's the ‘build your own ERP.’ You get QuickBooks, or Xero; you get 10 apps; you put them all together, and you never can see the data across the board. This is where I think you guys have solved this. How do you solve this? How do you solve that problem?

Joav Bally: We just announced, a couple of weeks back, the launch of the NetSuiteAnalytics Warehouse, and it's tailored exactly for what you said. Most of the NetSuite customers have a lot of their financial data, if not all of their financial data in NetSuite, but they're using other applications, as well — a Salesforce, for example, or other best-of-breed vendors out there. You would like to collect, and analyze the data, and get insight out of the data from one place, and that's exactly what the Analytics Warehouse is doing for you.

David Leary: [00:01:54] It's not just my NetSuite data. I'm going to be able to get data from other applications I have out in the world.

Joav Bally: [00:02:01] Exactly, exactly.

Marc Holliday: [00:02:02] Absolutely. Even things like spreadsheets you can bring into the Warehouse.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:05] Was this an Oracle solution that has now been adapted for NetSuite as part of this acquisition, or was it a new product?

Marc Holliday: Yes. It's built on Oracle's Autonomous Data Warehouse in the Oracle Analytics Cloud. What we've done is we have another analytics solution, our embedded solution, called SuiteAnalytics, that every NetSuite customer has access to inside of our accounting solution. We've taken our SuiteAnalytics Connect product, which is an export tool to move data out of NetSuite into other places — we've taken that technology and used Oracle's technology to prebuild a Data Warehouse exclusively for NetSuite customers. We've done all the heavy lifting. We're transforming all the data for them, taking it from a relational database to a multidimensional database, and giving them prepackaged KPIs, and dashboards, and then, the addition of other data sources can come into the Warehouse.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:11] Got it! SuiteAnalytics is the — that's inside of NetSuite.

Marc Holliday: [00:03:16] Correct.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:15] That's using the NetSuite database. You've connected now — for something that you couldn't do in NetSuite, you need to do in the Warehouse. You can get your data easily into there. I'd love to hear some examples of ways that the Warehouse is — what can the Warehouse do, the Data Warehouse, that I couldn't do in SuiteAnalytics.

Joav Bally: I think there are three main areas that our customers are really happy about to have the Analytics Warehouse. One is the third-party data integration. Third party, from the point of NetSuite, is non-NetSuite data. It's being able to take any data source they have. You spoke about QuickBooks’ 10 apps, so all these data that are being produced by these apps into one space.

[00:03:59] We also have customers that are new to NetSuite. That doesn't mean they're new to a business. They can be five, 10, or even, in some cases, more years in business. Already they've accumulated a lot of data over that time, and now that they are migrating to NetSuite, they ask us, “What can we do with this data? We still would like to analyze it. We would like to retain it for historical purposes.” Now, we have an answer. We can say, “Hey, just put in the Data Warehouse, and NetSuite will be your new system of record, but you are not using your old data. You can still analyze that.” All the non-NetSuite data sources we can integrate is one of the use cases.

David Leary: [00:04:33] Instead of migrating my old data to NetSuite, I start using NetSuite. I go that day forward using NetSuite, but because of the Data Warehouse, I still can — if I need to look up some old data, you just stick it in the Data Warehouse, and I can get to it.

Marc Holliday: [00:04:48] Absolutely. For compliance, and audit reasons, I know, in some industries, you have to keep your data for as long as seven years. Absolutely, the Warehouse has a use case that you can use it for that exact purpose.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:00] I wish we had something like that in the down-market world because one of the biggest complaints you hear is, “It's so hard to get my old data from my old accounting system into the new one,” whenever you're converting. It's a real challenge. This solves that. That’s great.

Marc Holliday: [00:05:14] Exactly. I think the possibilities are limitless. If you think about external data sources, you can bring in anything from weather data to analyze seasonality of your business to see if there are some patterns in terms of weather, in certain areas of the country, or the world—

David Leary: [00:05:30] Any data set I have access to I could just shove into the Data Warehouse, and then connect that, and crisscross reports of my NetSuite data?

Marc Holliday: [00:05:38] Right, and we've done all the heavy lifting by bringing all the NetSuite data in there for our customers, and we'll maintain what we call those data pipelines to refresh that data every day, or even more frequently, if they want to. Other examples could be to analyze your customer base and compare that with external market data, market-sizing data, to see where there might be new opportunities to grow your business or where you might be facing stiffer competition. Any outside data source, to mash it together with NetSuite data is what the real value, or one of the real values of this new Analytics Warehouse is.

David Leary: [00:06:17] What level of technology, or technical prowess would I need to do this?

Marc Holliday: [00:06:21] Point and click.

David Leary: [00:06:22] Do I need to bring in — is it the engineer — I'm an accounting firm, or I need to bring in my — do I need to hire an engineer at my company now to do this? Can I just dump this data in, and just map some fields, and use it?

Marc Holliday: [00:06:32] Point and click. If you can point, and click—

David Leary: [00:06:34] Can we quote you on that?

Marc Holliday: [00:06:36] Well, yeah. If you can point and click — well, let me qualify that. If you point and click, you can bring the NetSuite data in automatically, the external data sources. We have 25 pre-built data connectors to —

David Leary: [00:06:47] What are a couple of those?

Marc Holliday: [00:06:47] Google Analytics; Salesforce; those types of platforms ... To bring other external data sources in, it’s not point and click. There's some configuration, but just to do the NetSuite side of the Warehouse, it's setting it up, choosing which functional area of data you want — your financials, your inventory — and you send it over to the Warehouse. Then, on the visualization side, I don't know, Joav — I think that the skill set — if you know Excel, if you can understand Excel, and Excel pivots, and charts, and some of maybe the more cool statistical things you can do in Excel—

Blake Oliver: [00:07:26] The scatter charts looked really neat—

Marc Holliday: [00:07:28] The scatter charts, and the outlier charts. I think that would definitely help you understand the Warehouse. The Oracle technology has really put it in non-technical language, so you really don't need engineers; you don't need data scientists; you don't need BI development resources to use this and get value out of it.

David Leary: [00:07:49] I want to clarify something that I saw — I think I saw it today in the demo. Sometimes, you don't know, is this demo magic, or is this real? It was a scatter chart. Just like if you were on your computer, and you wanted to do a screenshot, and you just draw a box around the thing you want to screenshot, they drew a box around some of the scatter points, and it instantly refreshed the table down below. Was that real magic? [CROSSTALK 00:08:07]

Marc Holliday: [00:08:07] That's real. Of course.

David Leary: [00:08:09] That’s cool. I thought that was really — I have never seen that done before. Usually, you could drill down on stuff, click on one thing, but to just draw a box around — I thought that was really cool well. Congratulations.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:19] The other thing that was cool, which you mentioned — point and click — was you can drag data points, or what would you call them? It's like a box that says ‘Date,’ and you drag it into—

Marc Holliday: [00:08:29] Dimensions and-

Blake Oliver: [00:08:29] You drag that onto the x-axis, or the y-axis, and you can build a totally custom chart that way, just the way like a pivot table in Excel — actually, I would say you did it better. It's easier than that.

David Leary: [00:08:41] Yeah, because you have to build the pivot table, then take your pivot table, and turn it into a chart, when really, you just want the chart, so you may as well skip the pivot-table part. That makes a lot of sense.

Marc Holliday: [00:08:49] Another nice capability of the Warehouse is once you've got your analysis the way you want, the chart that you want, you can easily export it to Word, PowerPoint because a lot of times these analyses end up in presentations—

Blake Oliver: [00:09:03] Investor decks.

Marc Holliday: [00:09:04] Investor decks, those types of things. It's really just selecting ‘Export to PowerPoint,’ and it'll automatically create the slide for you.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:11] Well, so, it all looks lovely. What's the cost? How do folks get onto it? It looks amazing, so I feel like it's going to be pricey. Am I ...?

David Leary: [00:09:20] Well, you get analytics. You get the analytics for — not free, but it's part of NetSuite’s default—

Marc Holliday: [00:09:26] SuiteAnalytics is in the platform, so any subscriber to NetSuite Accounting ERP receives it. The Warehouse itself, what we can say is it's priced very well for our target market, which is the SMB market. We think it's going to be—

Blake Oliver: [00:09:42] Now, when you say SMB, what does that mean to you? Because it's so broad ...

Marc Holliday: [00:09:45] We generally define SMB as 1,000 employees or less as our general definition. Jo, would you agree? We've priced it competitively for that size company.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:55] Who's using it today? Is it available now? Is it out, and in the wild?

Joav Bally: [00:10:00] Yes, it is available. We went through a beta program; we had a couple of customers in beta who tested it. We launched it beginning of the month, October. We are seeing good traction. Of course, we can’t disclose numbers, but you've seen Clickstop being on stage with Evan; they’re referenced customers there. We are very excited with the outlook for that product.

[00:10:26] I think that many of our customers will be very interested in it because this is something where you need to reach a certain data and analytics maturity in your life cycle as a company in order to benefit from that. There definitely will be the life cycle that we'll see from customers who are using reports, and safe searches. They will use SuiteAnalytics. Of course, they will use Excel to a certain amount.

[00:10:49] At one point in their analytics maturity, they will say, “Hey, I need more. I need to bring in third-party data sources. I might want to do historical snapshotting, and analyze my data, how it changed over time, and understand patterns based on that.” For them, we are ready with the Analytics Warehouse, and I think they will appreciate the benefits, and they'll get a lot of insights out of it.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:12] I imagine there's just a lot of customers now that are exporting to Excel and doing all this in spreadsheets that could benefit big time.

Marc Holliday: [00:11:19] Absolutely. Export to Excel is a very common practice for the smaller and mid-sized companies to do the data analysis. That's one thing we think we're going to help solve because once you start swimming in a sea of spreadsheets, it's hard to keep the fidelity of the data, the integrity of the data. If you don't have confidence in your data, it's tough to make decisions, or take action on it.

David Leary: [00:11:40] Now, do you guys expose any data in the Data Warehouse, as far as like, “Other NetSuite users with businesses like yours ...”? Maybe I'm a brewery, and other breweries — there's some sort of generic anonymous data set that I could run things against. Do you guys provide any data from your other NetSuite users [CROSSTALK 11:57]

Marc Holliday: [00:11:58] -a benchmarking service? Today, we do not, but maybe down the road. That would be interesting to see, to compare within the industries, but today, we do not do any benchmarking services within the Warehouse.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:08] We always ask this question because benchmarking is one of those things that everyone asks for, but to do it right is so hard because garbage in, garbage out. What are you benchmarking against? Are these really businesses like yours?

David Leary: [00:12:20] Yeah, because that one brewery could be only selling direct to consumer; another brewery is selling to grocery stores, and their margins are completely different. You can't really compare.

Marc Holliday: [00:12:29] Yeah, and how many businesses run themselves exactly the same way? Yeah, that's always tough, but you’re right — people do ask for it a lot.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:37] Maybe you guys can work on that next.

Marc Holliday: [00:12:38] Yes, that'd be a good problem to solve.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:41] Well, do you want to take us out, David?

David Leary: [00:12:43] Yeah. Thanks both of you for joining us today. If somebody wants to learn more about this, or get a hold of you, what's probably the best way?

Marc Holliday: [00:12:50] They can visit NetSuite.com. We have full information out there about the Data Warehouse, or info@netsuite.com. We'll get you in touch with one of our account managers.

David Leary: [00:13:01] Great. I appreciate you guys joining us.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:04] Thank you, Joav. Thank you, Marc.

Marc Holliday: [00:13:06] Thanks for having us.

Joav Bally: [00:13:07] Thank you.