Why Companies Choose NetSuites Proven Cloud Platform over SAP to Power their Growth
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Good morning, good afternoon or even good evening depending on where you're joining us for today. We appreciate you making time for us today to spend some time talking about why companies choose NetSuite proven cloud platform. I'm pleased to be speaking with you and will take the next 45 minutes or so and I'll be introducing Garth later on in the program, but just to start off you know one of the big things I'll walk through really quickly is our agenda.
So actually, I'll start with our presenters. So, as I mentioned I will introduce Garza later on who's the SVP of Global Support and Services from Penguin Computing. We will really spend the majority of the time during the conversation with Gard.
My name is Ron de Beauvoir I'm responsible for industry marketing over here at NetSuite and one of the big things you may or may not know about NetSuite is it goes to market by industry. And we support a number of different industries across software services, manufacturing, etc. And one of the big things that that you know I've had the pleasure of being able to do over the last six years since I've been at NetSuite… I actually joined over from SAP. We get to work with a lot of different customers across a number of different industries and consistently across that timeframe, what I've discovered is very similar things that those customers have found and why they've chosen NetSuite and why they are our funding benefit.
And so hopefully you'll get more of that perspective over the course of the next the next 45 minutes or so. I'm going to start off and talk just about kind of as a brief overview of NetSuite so you're aware of who we are. I'll talk about Penguin Computing of course will be mostly having that conversation with Garth, and then of course the interview. In the end, question answers so if you have questions throughout this please doesn’t hesitate to write those questions in. We'll try to answer those as we best can and we'll go from there.
So I want to start here which is just to talk a little bit about the state of business today and of course most of you are aware of this. You know the world is changing right and I know it's often overused but I think it's important which is the only constant is change. And I think one of the things that is consistently there in that concept is that companies have to be thinking about maintaining a start-up state of mind you know. Companies need to think and operate like startups because the opportunities that are there today are global and regardless of whether you're a small company trying to think larger or you're a large company trying to think smaller and more nimble the same concepts apply across those types of companies.
Companies have to be responsive they have to be nimble or they run the risk of being quickly disrupted. Data is a gigantic weapon and it's becoming more important every day with the emerging trends like the Internet of Things in today's world. Every company is and need to be thinking like a cloud company and as we all know there's a huge trend in the industry to move to the cloud.
NetSuite is the leader in the cloud and as many loggers start to make noise about their cloud solutions it is important to understand what differentiates what NetSuite has to offer versus what we frankly see as many of the other offerings out there in the marketplace. We have numerous examples of companies who have used NetSuite to power ahead and whether you're talking about companies like LYFT that are changing the transportation world or Snapchats that are running a suite to change how we communicate, a GoPro and of course you'll hear from Penguin Computing today who really embodies that.
As a very specific example of that now this is a much more tactical look at how companies are running their business today: very fragmented and siloed. It is inefficient but the real big thing is most companies when they have a system landscape like this they can't respond to the changes that everyone faces in the real world. That same constant of change that I talked about before you know having to replace 10 or 15 systems, it's difficult to introduce new things and be able to go after new concepts and new ideas because you're stuck on these old technologies and you're stuck with these brittle connections that are frankly very easy to break.
And a lot of times it becomes easier not to touch anything and as a result companies are frozen and aren't able to change and make the changes they need to go after these new markets and that's really why NetSuite is here. I mean we look at why we've been able to be successful these are the not just the pillars to our success. They can also be the pillars to your success and in the center of it all is this idea of a global ERP designed for a modern company and enabling it to become the most deployed, advance, and in cloud ERP system in the world.
Now we go to market, we differentiate ourselves with the strongest platform in the industry and that's one of the things you're going to hear about as part of this conversation. It's not just a platform in the traditional sense of hey this is a platform I use but platform of what it enables a business to build, what they're doing and to build their strategy and build what they're doing forward. And we'll talk more about that as we go through this conversation.
So let's really talk about the five pillars that distinguish why businesses choose NetSuite and I'll walk through each of these in some detail before I go and introduce Garth and then really have that conversation further.
You know the first one is being designed a global ERP platform design for a modern business, the second is the best cloud platform in the industry, the third is a unified data model that allows our customers to maximize their use of data as a real competitive weapon true omni-channel commerce allowing your customer to be at the center of their business, and then I think probably this is one that sometimes is overlooked but is really important is this idea of being built for your industry. It's important to have both the broadness of a solution but also to have those industries civic capabilities as well.
So let's walk through each of those. So we talked about being designed for a modern business and being a global ERP. One of the big things is NetSuite is a cloud first and cloud only and one of the big things here is that all of our customers are on the same version of the product. This is an amazing thing. We have 30,000 organizations that use NetSuite day in and day out and they're all running on the same set of software. Major releases every year and weekly minor versions applied to virtually no downtime. Your Vespa is working with NetSuite 24 by 7 by 3 or 65 days but the big thing is you're not stuck on an old version with no access the latest and greatest functionality and you're always on the most leading-edge product and version in the market.
In the modern world you need to be able to carry out business 24 by 7 but you need to do it anywhere in the globe whether that's you know you need to have multi-company, multi-subsidiary, multi-site or multi-time zones.
And all of that being built into the same platform the second is our platform itself and we talk about our platform it's one of the best-kept secrets a industry. Many people would think that if you had solution which all 30,000 customers were seamlessly and upgraded it would mean the solution have very little flexibility but in fact that's not that's not the way we operate. We think that customization is not a bad word. In fact almost every single customer that uses NetSuite customizes as it seems some way and that's one of the first things we built into our system in our platform: to enable customers to be successful and enable folks to continue to be able to move forward with our system.
The third key pillar really though is our unified data model, and this is really the key to enable that. The way that companies need it today, our unified data model allows you to report and analyze your entire business from end to end and not just financials and HR, not just financial but real-time with no need to build complex data warehouses with multiple moving parts. Our unified data model delivers those analytical capabilities day one in real time from a self-service basis and this is a real differentiator from us as compared to platforms like SAP that are out there in the market. And it allows our customers to find who's able to view, analyze and transact what across their inner enterprise.
The fourth pillar is about commerce and this is about impacting the customer experience. This is how more and more businesses are trading today and as more and more companies are transacting online, and you know even saw it with a statistic over the Thanksgiving weekend. You had cyber, you know you had that Black Friday, you had Small Business Saturday, you had Cyber Monday, but the reality was more and more people were buying online they're researching online.
That was such a tremendous of factor on how people were getting product and that's just on a B2C basis but even from a perspective that's another important part of this as well and that's the fourth pillar or fourth piece of this.
And last but not least is then being built for software, and that is you know this is just one of the industries that we support. But I think that it's important is in each of the industries we support we have customers that are in this. We have dedicated experts that that understand it from an implementation, from account management, from a support, from a product management perspective, as well as specific functionality and customers.
Across each of those pieces is what make and differentiate NetSuite from the competition, enable us to deliver a dominant position in each of those industry but also enable our customers to get up and running much more quickly and much more seamlessly than other products out in the market And as a result, our customers are able to improve their business visibility, improve their financial management, improve their things like inventory, customer and IT management. They have measurable benefits across each of these avenues that they've been able to realize from NetSuite from each of those.
And so really in summary you know those five pillars kind of represent why companies are choosing NetSuite and why they're able to be successful in NetSuite. But I think the real you know the real part of this conversation is that I want to I wanted to now kind of shift gears with you and introduce Garth into the conversation and you know I think Garth can give you a very real world perspective from Penguin Computing, you know who is a NetSuite customer that's switched over from SAP to NetSuite.
And to talk a little bit about that, so Garth I want to go ahead and give you a chance to introduce yourself and then we'll go through and introduce Penguin Computing and then we can we can we can talk a little bit about that more detail. So, Garth…
Garth: Thank you very much so my name is Garth Thompson and I'm the senior VP of Global Support Services and IT at Penguin Computing. I've been with a company for going on 13 years now and before that I've been IT service support and ERP for 20 plus years in the industry so been around a bit and seen a lot of different ERP systems.
Ron de Beauvoir: Thanks Garth and do you want to go ahead and introduce just kind of give people the perspective on who Penguin Computing is and what you guys do?
Garth: So Penguin Computing is… we are started out as the one of the only Linux based hardware integrators back about 15 years ago specializing Linux and servers. Since then we've grown a lot now we're calling ourselves the pioneering compute storage networking solutions and we deliver these on open platforms so OPC OCP I mean copper to find networks Linux our HPC and the cloud offering. So we have a huge offering of products and service our customers around HPC and enterprise computer and recently we just got Tundra which is our own product it's the first time that we're making our own products. And not acting as an integrator and we have nine of our tundra systems placed in the top 500 this year and seven of those I believe are on the top 100 fastest computers in the world right now so it's been a huge year for us.
We're maybe other in yeah so we're based in Fremont, California, where our main Factory is. We also have satellite offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, Manassas, and then DC and we do everything in-house, so everything is brought into our Fremont factory. We do all integration, the testing, and the QA. They're our support teams are all very experienced senior Linux's admins who are all based in Fremont or some advanced and lands in NASA the core of our team is in Fremont. Everything's done in country and in-house yeah and that's the thing. We’re a very dedicated technical company loves what we do.
Ron de Beauvoir: Actually, awesome and you may have already said this I may have just missed it, but I'll ask it anyway. And so how long is you know you said you've been at the Penguin for 13 years, how long is Penguin been around and as a organization or company.
Garth: I want to say 15 but I'm always liking a couple of years behind, so I think it's actually longer than that now it's 15 to 17 years. I have to think about that, but we've been around for a while and you know obviously but it's part of this conversation.
Ron de Beauvoir: Well, you know can you talk a little bit about the business? When you guys brought it in? When did you bring in NetSuite and then also you know kind of what was happening in the business and what kind of spurred that decision?
Garth: Yeah so I was actually hired as the Director of IT when I first renting one and one of the things I was charged to do was to fix our ERP system and what I arrived to find was a poorly implemented SAP ERP system. That over the years and through I don't know, I would say organic decay had become a total black box that nobody in the company actually understood how to work with, how to use. They punch numbers in and sometimes get numbers out and sometimes those numbers were right but nobody really knew for sure how to double check any of that and so I was tasked to fix this.
And we spent maybe three to four years trying to fix it and countless hours, countless consultants, countless time and money spent on it and finally I wanted to call it. I was like it's done we need to do implementation. It took about another two to three years and a new CFO training to actually make that happen and so I was campaigning for years and years to make it happen but we had to get a CFO that wasn't afraid of change and a lot of CFOs a lot of companies fear that whole like Oh switching I repeat companies will sink the company or the ERP system will sink the company. You know the too much of a resource, train you'll kill us, we can't do it we have to stick with what we know even if it's painful and I finally got a CFO who agreed it was time to change and then we did it.
We evaluated a bunch of people in the market and NetSuite kind of hit all of the key factors that we needed and so we just bit the bullet and did it and it actually went remarkably well.
Do you want detailed alimentation?
Ron de Beauvoir: Yes, yeah. When was that you know I guess when did that process start? I know you mentioned the two or three years but once you kind of finally got a you know at that conversation going when did that process start? And you know going into the end of the pieces.
Garth: Yeah so what we did. I would not recommend to most of you because we an exceptionally technical team working for me and a couple of us have a lot of ERP experience so we got to go ahead about Q2 that we needed that we could do the change but we had to have it done by the end of the year so we did a quick evaluation of like the main players. Oracle, Sage and a couple smaller players and did the quick matrix like here's what we want here, our base requirements, which ones even fit those, which ones don't and then you know isolated the couple that kind of hit the requirements and look at the technology layers that they're on. And this was really important for me.
We ran our own cloud service. I understand cloud intimately and the difference between you know real cloud services versus you know companies are putting instances in the cloud and calling them cloud when they're not really and all. The different flavors you know in between and a couple really hard technical requirements that it had to be a pure true cloud company with one single codebases. It had to have a really robust and open API because after the thing with SAP I never wanted my data locked into his systems I couldn't get out at my will you know.
And so I wanted an API an open system cloud-based and it had to be usable it had to have a user interface that I could take a user and within not days or weeks of training but minutes to hours of seeing notes in their face and intuitively understand it. We had to have data visibility at any point in the order to cash cycle. I had to step in to the interaction and be able to trace it both ways upstream and downstream and see you know why are the numbers off, what happened here, did you know in order to go wrong or is it correct or you know just actually see where it's hitting and how it's doing with GL and every step of the way.
And so, after doing that evaluation NetSuite was the only one that actually is able to fulfill all of our requirements, so we did a full implementation in one quarter. We started in October and we went live I think January 11th or January 17th somewhere in that and that week we went live. We did minimal data migrations our safety data. It was so ugly and messy that most it was kind of useless, so he left everything there except for open financial transactions that cross the year barrier. They of course need to be moved over so that we could you know continue to track those and then account balances and a couple other things you know product catalog and you know some other stuff. And that was it. And then we started fresh and we were hoping that Q1 would be a light you know. Q1 of the traditionally our lightest corridor ever and so we did this so that we'd have you know light Q1 to go through and you know they're always meet bugs and hiccups. Some things like that when you move ERP systems but as it happened to be Q1 happened to be our biggest quarter up to date.
That Q1 was our biggest quarter ever and so not only do we go live in a brand-new ERP system we had our biggest busiest quarter ever. And we somehow managed to survive so it actually worked surprisingly well right out of the box.
Ron de Beauvoir: That's pretty impressive. Can you know it's a couple things I wanted to drill into what you just described? So, first of all that that's a pretty impressive implementation. Were there things you know I mean obviously you know just from my own perspective obviously that NetSuite made a little easier to implement than some of those platforms? But just I don't know if you can describe what were some of the things that made it easier than some of the other platforms that you you've used in the past and they've done the pass that enables you guys to go live so quickly?
Garth: So, I mean the API in NetSuite is without a doubt the best my teams are used to. It is phenomenally easy and makes sense. The engineers who developed the API maintain it like it works and it's logical and coherent.
Ron de Beauvoir: Now you worked a lot of companies. That's actually rare to these days.
Garth: So, we had consulting hours and we actually came in 40% under budget because. An example would be we don't enter orders directly right. We have our own middleware that puts our orders together. And then you know used to have this horrible flat file was sent to SAP and she would parse through it and it would be days to change it because it was spaced eliminated. So one space or any negative white space in there are anything but through the entire file and be processed wrong so it would literally take days to two weeks with consulting effort to change a single input on our old input-output files for orders.
I want to change to NetSuite so we had budgeted like a solid month to get that working in NetSuite through their API, and from not even seeing the API to having it working with a week for my engineer and by the time he talked to NetSuite consulting to see if we needed any help he had already done with it and he was like oh yeah no it just actually worked. It's totally logical and coherent so a lot of the things that we expect it to be really painful ended up being literally like days to weeks to implement when we had budgeted weeks to months to implement on some of these things.
And then the transparency of it and the overall design of the app make it very easy to work with data is very easy to find when things are wrong. it's generally very easy to track back and see where they went wrong you know at what point the variables are set wrong. Customizations are super easy to make so we customized it as we went and literally it's minutes to hours to make customizations and adapt it to our business requirements. And it can be done by you know my programmers.
They are well versed in like Salesforce.com and the better kind of platforms out there and that's it, We just fit into that paradigm it's the same way to edit to modify to update it to customize it and it just works. It's super easy to deal with in that respect and super-fast.
Ron de Beauvoir: So, you also brought up another interesting thing that I wanted to drill into a little bit which was you mentioned at the beginning you're obviously you're probably smarter than the average bear when it comes to clouds given you guys operate in the cloud. And obviously I have some very specific expertise in that space but and you said you were pretty diligent in your research and how you investigated these other vendors and things like that um you know I guess you know Garth you if you look at something you can obviously evaluate it very differently than then somebody else might be able to say that were CFO or even some CIOs that haven't necessarily been operating in the cloud paradigm.
So I guess what advice would you give them of how they can kind of compare these differences because there is exactly what you described right there are true cloud offerings like NetSuite but there are a number of others that are hosted or you know single tenant or you know they claim they're clouds just but cloud watch. How would you advise those folks?
Garth: I mean that so the days you get a true hosted or a true cloud offering versus a hosted or a single tenant or an instance like that is the code base. And what you really never want to do and then the ERP system is get stuck on a code base of ages because that's what kills you on your few systems. I worked with Oracle, I work of SAP over to all of them and after they aged awhile, you have to do updates and stuff like that. It's a painful process. it's scary your customizations are at risk. It creates a ton of ongoing work and stress for your IT group or your ERP group if your company is not set up to manage that stuff.
And so, the number one factor is you know it needs to be a single codebase that all the customers run on that allows customizations that are guaranteed to roll forward. And they need a consistent release cycle of features that every customer gets and if it doesn't have that if anybody says hey you know we have this instant thing where we'll put up an instance for you or you know it's a single tenant type all they're doing is they're taking their old code which is not updated which is not a modern codebase they've hacked it and put it together in such a way that they're hosting it on servers but all those problems exist. They're just trying to hide them under the rug from you. They have their IT teams dealing with it.
The API's are probably even the older API’s and not nearly as robust and we'll defined as API's for modern architectures are and you're gonna run into all the connection and kind of use issues you would on older systems. It's just that they're IT team is dealing with a lot of that pain instead of yours but from the technology side I don't want that my company moves very quickly we you know we change corners or go around corners at Lightspeed basically and I need to know that the architecture that I'm on is not gonna hold me down and as we continue growing and using modern standards and modern ideas of design and there's kind of hard to explain to non-engineers but I need your IT out there should understand what I'm saying it's fundamentally code that is written for the cloud is expected to behave in different ways than code that was written to be on premise.
It's been moved to the cloud and the devil is in the details. You start doing a lot of the implementations and writing your own code to pull data to and from them. That's when you can really run into problems with older code bases because they're not designed for that.
Ron de Beauvoir: Is everything that is that your essential your IT infrastructure ISM with all cloud essentially from what you guys do?
Garth: Yeah so when I took over the infrastructure you know that everything was on premise and we had exchange and outlook and you know kind of a hybrid Linux based Microsoft stuff. And having run IT for about twenty plus years, one of the first things I was trying forgot is like where are the pain points. How you minimize this and as the cloud services out there became more robust you get more for your money by going with a well-developed and well run cloud service than you almost ever can internally just because the IT resources to manage these services internally are actually really high and the stress level is really high to keep them up because expectations now for users is you know 99.9% uptime.
They want to use it from home, they want to use it from work, they want to use it from you know grandma's house when they're out at Thanksgiving. You know the expectation is they can access their data anywhere at any time and if you're running on premise that's a really hard order to fulfill. Plus, they're running on Windows they're running on surface. They're running on you know Android Mac Linux you know everything and so it has to be especially for our environment where we are such a Linux based company, we have such a mix of users and customers. Is it web-based? If it's not web-based it's tied down to an OS, it just becomes a nightmare for my IT team to try and manage and deal with.
So, at this point I would say 80 to 90% of the services that we use our web-based and SAS services to the point now that I have more integrators , programmers, engineers on my IT team then I do actually desktop or traditional IT people because we do more integrations of services now than we do of maintaining servers.
Ron de Beauvoir: You know I don't know you know one of the questions is kind of come in and one of the one of the folks was struggling just trying to understand somehow. They get that they get a sense of the business benefits of NetSuite versus SAP and yeah and I don't know if you can if you can kind of talk to that a little bit but you know if you have a sense you know when you guys are obviously evaluating these two you're obviously you're moving for an old version of SAP be looking at the new versions versus NetSuite. You know how did you guys evaluate those two and you know what we're what were some of the business benefits of the of the two?
Garth: So, cost was the most obvious one. So, the cost of implementing NetSuite was a fraction of implementing SAP and can be done in a much shorter timeframe. So the absolute minimum timeframe that using consultants could we were not we would not have been able to do SAP implementation ourselves but working with consultants at the absolute minimum timeframe. We had four bare-bones implementations was six to eight months and that was pushing things so that was too long for us and expensive.
The implementation costs alone of SAP was more than what we ended up paying for the implementation and licenses for NetSuite. Then we added the licenses and in the recurring licenses for what we were currently paying for SAP was actually the just the support alone. Two-thirds of the costs of what we ended up implementing and our first year of NetSuite so there's a huge cost savings and the efficiency gain was immediate and obvious I think at least a 30% gain for our Finance Group because SAP was cumbersome. It's dated the interface and the way it works it's not it takes us a moderate to significant amount of training to get people up to speed. And time to get them kind of productive and what we found with NetSuite is with kind of an initial training and then a follow-up training about a month later that especially the finance team was more productive right off the bat.
I'm right out the gate they liked the application. A user acceptance is a huge problem. With a few systems they're not a lot of one matures. The older ones are not really fun to use; they're not intuitive, they kind of don't follow modern standards design a lot of them. NetSuite was nice to use the point where people actually you know we're not complaining about it. They found it pleasant, easy to use easy to follow and see the data that's so hard. So, I mean that gets underestimated all the time but when you're doing something and seeing the impact of it and in like why don't you click spill and see hey this just happened.
Let's check the GL oh okay there's a GL. Right that makes sense we're good to go so there's a lot of stuff we are not moving off of Excel. Half of our company is running, and it sells spreadsheets when we’re running on SAP because it's so hard to get data out of SAP and that kind of useful relevant format, we're in NetSuite it was a matter of minutes to get the data out that we needed. It was real time which was also hugely important and so from our CFO loved it from day one she said it was a complete win for her and her team and within a year of our implementation we had numbers. You know kind of matching our other system.
We have a an order management system that generates orders and stuff so we can I have two systems that kind of track what we build and sell and with SAP, we could never get them synched up we could never get them within you know three or four margin points. And there's always wild swings you can never figure out which one within the first year we had them like almost perfectly synced up. And if there's any deviation it would just take minutes to go in and track where that deviation arose from and why it happened. The clarity of data in NetSuite far surpasses any art pieces whatever used.
Ron de Beauvoir: And that that's just a huge win for any organization right there Garth and I may have been incentives and I just want to come back to it. Is um how long now have you guys been using the platform three years, four years okay and so you can approve three or four I guess you're good too. Right almost eight upgrades, I guess so far above NetSuite. What and have you guys changed your usage of the I guess can you talk a little bit about what all you use NetSuite and has that expanded? Has that changed over that timeframe?
Garth: Yeah, it's expanded lot. So, we do pretty much a full financial and you know manufacturing inventory work order with revenue recognition. You know GL invoicing um pretty much all the core stuff for company is run through it. Now we started out relatively light especially on the operation side because we were trying figure out how to get it to work with what we did. What we did is our model didn't quite fit in the NetSuite models and what we do is a lot. Right we have a service offering we have a software offering. We build hardware we integrate hardware.
We have consulting professional services and we have like ongoing recurring managed services. So, we have a lot of different areas that we play in and so we started relatively simple and clean on the original implementation and then as we've seen new modules as we understand the system our users knows like hey does it do this thing you know no we contact NetSuite oh yes it can do that. If you add you know X module or Y module and so we've added, you know budgeting. We've done a much more for travel and expense integration. Purchasing I think is one of the next things we're looking at adding on. We added on whip this year so we kind of have a continual upgrading integration path and that nice thing about NetSuite is it's really easy to do these implementations.
They're you know they're not stressful. It's a month or so of planning. It's an implementation, it's training and we're kind of off to the races and good to go again. So the implementation time and time it takes to actually add new features or change existing features to match business needs, it's literally a matter of days two weeks to do this compared to months, multiple months when I was on SAP to try and get it done. And we can do it in-house most of the time that's really helped.
Ron de Beauvoir: So, then are you guys leveraging NetSuite for all the kind of some of the manufacturing the assemblies and things like that?
Garth: Yep. Wow alright so we have a and you know we wrote all of our integrations and customizations ourselves to do this but from our order management system which is you know basically configure a PC or configure server, add drives and what motherboard and you know all those kind of bits. it creates the order and NetSuite I think creates the work order and then that goes into whip and we have a change order management process also which integrates the two. So, if there's a change order either done on the NetSuite side or on our order side. There's the two kind of sync up. It can lock an order if it needs to you know be locked and not shipped before the change is made then all the way through to you know shipping and invoicing. RMA's everything. it's all handled to it and it’s night and day difference and being on at city on how will we contract just everything that goes on in the system. And every bit that goes in and out the door now. We can generally track, and it makes sense.
Ron de Beauvoir: I think my only last kind a big question. I want to ask to you Garth is just you know what’s next. As you guys see about where you want to go with Penguin. I mean obviously you guys are continuing to expand quite a bit, but you know what you guys see is next in terms of what you're doing with NetSuite and kind of how you look to expand your usage there?
Garth: So, you know those are our kind of challenge rounds coming up in future. Ours are little business is growing significantly. We kind of are in the process of opening up our first office in London. You know we do a lot of business in Japan and we're looking at some other countries. Also, we're starting to grow in and so we might have to do you know do the global foot sales for uh NetSuite One World. There you have One World, so you know that that's on the table for next year probably or the year after.
At the latest advanced purchasing and then really dialing in what we have, we had such an explosive year and growth right now that we're still kind of recovering from that and figuring out ok you know how we update the system to manage that. And that was some amazing things like real-time while it was happening the issue, we realized that one of our kind of new business branches needed to be handled differently. As far as the way we've built the servers and handle them that the current the current method that we've used up till now didn't work. It only took us about two weeks to look at the system design to figure out how to implement this new entirely new build process into our system. And then another two weeks to implement it so in a month from start to end we pretty much implemented an entire new build whip design process in the system, and I came here.
Imagine how we would have done that in SAP. We could not have done in SAP. There's just no way we've done it without NetSuite. it was amazingly clean and how it ended clean and clear on how we did it and that's what you need for a tool today. That's like why we're on NetSuite, a tool that you can adapt and change to match how your business changes in real time.
Ron de Beauvoir: You can't wait months and six months for implementations anymore so yeah makes sense. I really appreciate the perspective. I’m going to just give just one you know if there is anyone else that have any other questions out on the line definitely one of them you know give you give you that quick opportunity if you do otherwise we'll wrap it up. We did have one I think we I got I got a little geeked out Garth and started to go down into the geek City with you and someone was uh was feeling a little too deep down for us so I tried to bring it back a little bit but I you know I don't think there's any other questions that are out there.
I think I've tried to answer most of those so I appreciate you know most of the question that you most of your responses here have been able to answer that but one other question that is here that I did want to answer is what's the smallest small business that could handle in NetSuite?
This is um the question I get often asked this question, particularly from smaller companies but also from larger companies and the short answer to this is really we have companies as small as two people using NetSuite all the way to you know multi-thousands. NetSuite itself uses NetSuite so we're over work literally over 5,000 plays using this week but what we find is it's not necessarily it's not a that you have too few employees that you'll be overloaded because you get out of it what you need. And what I found is these smaller companies are able to realize a lot of free up a lot of time and benefits that they aren't having to deal with systems. Even the typical systems they can get those maintained leveraging NetSuite.
So I don't know if that answers the question but hopefully it does I think you know Garth I just wanted to thank you for making time for today and for jumping on the call with us. And I want to thank everyone else for making time as well to be on this call with us and if you do have any follow-up questions you know please don't hesitate to reach out.
There this call has been recorded and we'll be sending out a copy of the recording to everyone and it'll be available for replay later. Thanks everyone, thank you.
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Good morning, good afternoon or even good evening depending on where you're joining us for today. We appreciate you making time for us today to spend some time talking about why companies choose NetSuite proven cloud platform. I'm pleased to be speaking with you and will take the next 45 minutes or so and I'll be introducing Garth later on in the program, but just to start off you know one of the big things I'll walk through really quickly is our agenda.
So actually, I'll start with our presenters. So, as I mentioned I will introduce Garza later on who's the SVP of Global Support and Services from Penguin Computing. We will really spend the majority of the time during the conversation with Gard.
My name is Ron de Beauvoir I'm responsible for industry marketing over here at NetSuite and one of the big things you may or may not know about NetSuite is it goes to market by industry. And we support a number of different industries across software services, manufacturing, etc. And one of the big things that that you know I've had the pleasure of being able to do over the last six years since I've been at NetSuite… I actually joined over from SAP. We get to work with a lot of different customers across a number of different industries and consistently across that timeframe, what I've discovered is very similar things that those customers have found and why they've chosen NetSuite and why they are our funding benefit.
And so hopefully you'll get more of that perspective over the course of the next the next 45 minutes or so. I'm going to start off and talk just about kind of as a brief overview of NetSuite so you're aware of who we are. I'll talk about Penguin Computing of course will be mostly having that conversation with Garth, and then of course the interview. In the end, question answers so if you have questions throughout this please doesn’t hesitate to write those questions in. We'll try to answer those as we best can and we'll go from there.
So I want to start here which is just to talk a little bit about the state of business today and of course most of you are aware of this. You know the world is changing right and I know it's often overused but I think it's important which is the only constant is change. And I think one of the things that is consistently there in that concept is that companies have to be thinking about maintaining a start-up state of mind you know. Companies need to think and operate like startups because the opportunities that are there today are global and regardless of whether you're a small company trying to think larger or you're a large company trying to think smaller and more nimble the same concepts apply across those types of companies.
Companies have to be responsive they have to be nimble or they run the risk of being quickly disrupted. Data is a gigantic weapon and it's becoming more important every day with the emerging trends like the Internet of Things in today's world. Every company is and need to be thinking like a cloud company and as we all know there's a huge trend in the industry to move to the cloud.
NetSuite is the leader in the cloud and as many loggers start to make noise about their cloud solutions it is important to understand what differentiates what NetSuite has to offer versus what we frankly see as many of the other offerings out there in the marketplace. We have numerous examples of companies who have used NetSuite to power ahead and whether you're talking about companies like LYFT that are changing the transportation world or Snapchats that are running a suite to change how we communicate, a GoPro and of course you'll hear from Penguin Computing today who really embodies that.
As a very specific example of that now this is a much more tactical look at how companies are running their business today: very fragmented and siloed. It is inefficient but the real big thing is most companies when they have a system landscape like this they can't respond to the changes that everyone faces in the real world. That same constant of change that I talked about before you know having to replace 10 or 15 systems, it's difficult to introduce new things and be able to go after new concepts and new ideas because you're stuck on these old technologies and you're stuck with these brittle connections that are frankly very easy to break.
And a lot of times it becomes easier not to touch anything and as a result companies are frozen and aren't able to change and make the changes they need to go after these new markets and that's really why NetSuite is here. I mean we look at why we've been able to be successful these are the not just the pillars to our success. They can also be the pillars to your success and in the center of it all is this idea of a global ERP designed for a modern company and enabling it to become the most deployed, advance, and in cloud ERP system in the world.
Now we go to market, we differentiate ourselves with the strongest platform in the industry and that's one of the things you're going to hear about as part of this conversation. It's not just a platform in the traditional sense of hey this is a platform I use but platform of what it enables a business to build, what they're doing and to build their strategy and build what they're doing forward. And we'll talk more about that as we go through this conversation.
So let's really talk about the five pillars that distinguish why businesses choose NetSuite and I'll walk through each of these in some detail before I go and introduce Garth and then really have that conversation further.
You know the first one is being designed a global ERP platform design for a modern business, the second is the best cloud platform in the industry, the third is a unified data model that allows our customers to maximize their use of data as a real competitive weapon true omni-channel commerce allowing your customer to be at the center of their business, and then I think probably this is one that sometimes is overlooked but is really important is this idea of being built for your industry. It's important to have both the broadness of a solution but also to have those industries civic capabilities as well.
So let's walk through each of those. So we talked about being designed for a modern business and being a global ERP. One of the big things is NetSuite is a cloud first and cloud only and one of the big things here is that all of our customers are on the same version of the product. This is an amazing thing. We have 30,000 organizations that use NetSuite day in and day out and they're all running on the same set of software. Major releases every year and weekly minor versions applied to virtually no downtime. Your Vespa is working with NetSuite 24 by 7 by 3 or 65 days but the big thing is you're not stuck on an old version with no access the latest and greatest functionality and you're always on the most leading-edge product and version in the market.
In the modern world you need to be able to carry out business 24 by 7 but you need to do it anywhere in the globe whether that's you know you need to have multi-company, multi-subsidiary, multi-site or multi-time zones.
And all of that being built into the same platform the second is our platform itself and we talk about our platform it's one of the best-kept secrets a industry. Many people would think that if you had solution which all 30,000 customers were seamlessly and upgraded it would mean the solution have very little flexibility but in fact that's not that's not the way we operate. We think that customization is not a bad word. In fact almost every single customer that uses NetSuite customizes as it seems some way and that's one of the first things we built into our system in our platform: to enable customers to be successful and enable folks to continue to be able to move forward with our system.
The third key pillar really though is our unified data model, and this is really the key to enable that. The way that companies need it today, our unified data model allows you to report and analyze your entire business from end to end and not just financials and HR, not just financial but real-time with no need to build complex data warehouses with multiple moving parts. Our unified data model delivers those analytical capabilities day one in real time from a self-service basis and this is a real differentiator from us as compared to platforms like SAP that are out there in the market. And it allows our customers to find who's able to view, analyze and transact what across their inner enterprise.
The fourth pillar is about commerce and this is about impacting the customer experience. This is how more and more businesses are trading today and as more and more companies are transacting online, and you know even saw it with a statistic over the Thanksgiving weekend. You had cyber, you know you had that Black Friday, you had Small Business Saturday, you had Cyber Monday, but the reality was more and more people were buying online they're researching online.
That was such a tremendous of factor on how people were getting product and that's just on a B2C basis but even from a perspective that's another important part of this as well and that's the fourth pillar or fourth piece of this.
And last but not least is then being built for software, and that is you know this is just one of the industries that we support. But I think that it's important is in each of the industries we support we have customers that are in this. We have dedicated experts that that understand it from an implementation, from account management, from a support, from a product management perspective, as well as specific functionality and customers.
Across each of those pieces is what make and differentiate NetSuite from the competition, enable us to deliver a dominant position in each of those industry but also enable our customers to get up and running much more quickly and much more seamlessly than other products out in the market And as a result, our customers are able to improve their business visibility, improve their financial management, improve their things like inventory, customer and IT management. They have measurable benefits across each of these avenues that they've been able to realize from NetSuite from each of those.
And so really in summary you know those five pillars kind of represent why companies are choosing NetSuite and why they're able to be successful in NetSuite. But I think the real you know the real part of this conversation is that I want to I wanted to now kind of shift gears with you and introduce Garth into the conversation and you know I think Garth can give you a very real world perspective from Penguin Computing, you know who is a NetSuite customer that's switched over from SAP to NetSuite.
And to talk a little bit about that, so Garth I want to go ahead and give you a chance to introduce yourself and then we'll go through and introduce Penguin Computing and then we can we can we can talk a little bit about that more detail. So, Garth…
Garth: Thank you very much so my name is Garth Thompson and I'm the senior VP of Global Support Services and IT at Penguin Computing. I've been with a company for going on 13 years now and before that I've been IT service support and ERP for 20 plus years in the industry so been around a bit and seen a lot of different ERP systems.
Ron de Beauvoir: Thanks Garth and do you want to go ahead and introduce just kind of give people the perspective on who Penguin Computing is and what you guys do?
Garth: So Penguin Computing is… we are started out as the one of the only Linux based hardware integrators back about 15 years ago specializing Linux and servers. Since then we've grown a lot now we're calling ourselves the pioneering compute storage networking solutions and we deliver these on open platforms so OPC OCP I mean copper to find networks Linux our HPC and the cloud offering. So we have a huge offering of products and service our customers around HPC and enterprise computer and recently we just got Tundra which is our own product it's the first time that we're making our own products. And not acting as an integrator and we have nine of our tundra systems placed in the top 500 this year and seven of those I believe are on the top 100 fastest computers in the world right now so it's been a huge year for us.
We're maybe other in yeah so we're based in Fremont, California, where our main Factory is. We also have satellite offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, Manassas, and then DC and we do everything in-house, so everything is brought into our Fremont factory. We do all integration, the testing, and the QA. They're our support teams are all very experienced senior Linux's admins who are all based in Fremont or some advanced and lands in NASA the core of our team is in Fremont. Everything's done in country and in-house yeah and that's the thing. We’re a very dedicated technical company loves what we do.
Ron de Beauvoir: Actually, awesome and you may have already said this I may have just missed it, but I'll ask it anyway. And so how long is you know you said you've been at the Penguin for 13 years, how long is Penguin been around and as a organization or company.
Garth: I want to say 15 but I'm always liking a couple of years behind, so I think it's actually longer than that now it's 15 to 17 years. I have to think about that, but we've been around for a while and you know obviously but it's part of this conversation.
Ron de Beauvoir: Well, you know can you talk a little bit about the business? When you guys brought it in? When did you bring in NetSuite and then also you know kind of what was happening in the business and what kind of spurred that decision?
Garth: Yeah so I was actually hired as the Director of IT when I first renting one and one of the things I was charged to do was to fix our ERP system and what I arrived to find was a poorly implemented SAP ERP system. That over the years and through I don't know, I would say organic decay had become a total black box that nobody in the company actually understood how to work with, how to use. They punch numbers in and sometimes get numbers out and sometimes those numbers were right but nobody really knew for sure how to double check any of that and so I was tasked to fix this.
And we spent maybe three to four years trying to fix it and countless hours, countless consultants, countless time and money spent on it and finally I wanted to call it. I was like it's done we need to do implementation. It took about another two to three years and a new CFO training to actually make that happen and so I was campaigning for years and years to make it happen but we had to get a CFO that wasn't afraid of change and a lot of CFOs a lot of companies fear that whole like Oh switching I repeat companies will sink the company or the ERP system will sink the company. You know the too much of a resource, train you'll kill us, we can't do it we have to stick with what we know even if it's painful and I finally got a CFO who agreed it was time to change and then we did it.
We evaluated a bunch of people in the market and NetSuite kind of hit all of the key factors that we needed and so we just bit the bullet and did it and it actually went remarkably well.
Do you want detailed alimentation?
Ron de Beauvoir: Yes, yeah. When was that you know I guess when did that process start? I know you mentioned the two or three years but once you kind of finally got a you know at that conversation going when did that process start? And you know going into the end of the pieces.
Garth: Yeah so what we did. I would not recommend to most of you because we an exceptionally technical team working for me and a couple of us have a lot of ERP experience so we got to go ahead about Q2 that we needed that we could do the change but we had to have it done by the end of the year so we did a quick evaluation of like the main players. Oracle, Sage and a couple smaller players and did the quick matrix like here's what we want here, our base requirements, which ones even fit those, which ones don't and then you know isolated the couple that kind of hit the requirements and look at the technology layers that they're on. And this was really important for me.
We ran our own cloud service. I understand cloud intimately and the difference between you know real cloud services versus you know companies are putting instances in the cloud and calling them cloud when they're not really and all. The different flavors you know in between and a couple really hard technical requirements that it had to be a pure true cloud company with one single codebases. It had to have a really robust and open API because after the thing with SAP I never wanted my data locked into his systems I couldn't get out at my will you know.
And so I wanted an API an open system cloud-based and it had to be usable it had to have a user interface that I could take a user and within not days or weeks of training but minutes to hours of seeing notes in their face and intuitively understand it. We had to have data visibility at any point in the order to cash cycle. I had to step in to the interaction and be able to trace it both ways upstream and downstream and see you know why are the numbers off, what happened here, did you know in order to go wrong or is it correct or you know just actually see where it's hitting and how it's doing with GL and every step of the way.
And so, after doing that evaluation NetSuite was the only one that actually is able to fulfill all of our requirements, so we did a full implementation in one quarter. We started in October and we went live I think January 11th or January 17th somewhere in that and that week we went live. We did minimal data migrations our safety data. It was so ugly and messy that most it was kind of useless, so he left everything there except for open financial transactions that cross the year barrier. They of course need to be moved over so that we could you know continue to track those and then account balances and a couple other things you know product catalog and you know some other stuff. And that was it. And then we started fresh and we were hoping that Q1 would be a light you know. Q1 of the traditionally our lightest corridor ever and so we did this so that we'd have you know light Q1 to go through and you know they're always meet bugs and hiccups. Some things like that when you move ERP systems but as it happened to be Q1 happened to be our biggest quarter up to date.
That Q1 was our biggest quarter ever and so not only do we go live in a brand-new ERP system we had our biggest busiest quarter ever. And we somehow managed to survive so it actually worked surprisingly well right out of the box.
Ron de Beauvoir: That's pretty impressive. Can you know it's a couple things I wanted to drill into what you just described? So, first of all that that's a pretty impressive implementation. Were there things you know I mean obviously you know just from my own perspective obviously that NetSuite made a little easier to implement than some of those platforms? But just I don't know if you can describe what were some of the things that made it easier than some of the other platforms that you you've used in the past and they've done the pass that enables you guys to go live so quickly?
Garth: So, I mean the API in NetSuite is without a doubt the best my teams are used to. It is phenomenally easy and makes sense. The engineers who developed the API maintain it like it works and it's logical and coherent.
Ron de Beauvoir: Now you worked a lot of companies. That's actually rare to these days.
Garth: So, we had consulting hours and we actually came in 40% under budget because. An example would be we don't enter orders directly right. We have our own middleware that puts our orders together. And then you know used to have this horrible flat file was sent to SAP and she would parse through it and it would be days to change it because it was spaced eliminated. So one space or any negative white space in there are anything but through the entire file and be processed wrong so it would literally take days to two weeks with consulting effort to change a single input on our old input-output files for orders.
I want to change to NetSuite so we had budgeted like a solid month to get that working in NetSuite through their API, and from not even seeing the API to having it working with a week for my engineer and by the time he talked to NetSuite consulting to see if we needed any help he had already done with it and he was like oh yeah no it just actually worked. It's totally logical and coherent so a lot of the things that we expect it to be really painful ended up being literally like days to weeks to implement when we had budgeted weeks to months to implement on some of these things.
And then the transparency of it and the overall design of the app make it very easy to work with data is very easy to find when things are wrong. it's generally very easy to track back and see where they went wrong you know at what point the variables are set wrong. Customizations are super easy to make so we customized it as we went and literally it's minutes to hours to make customizations and adapt it to our business requirements. And it can be done by you know my programmers.
They are well versed in like Salesforce.com and the better kind of platforms out there and that's it, We just fit into that paradigm it's the same way to edit to modify to update it to customize it and it just works. It's super easy to deal with in that respect and super-fast.
Ron de Beauvoir: So, you also brought up another interesting thing that I wanted to drill into a little bit which was you mentioned at the beginning you're obviously you're probably smarter than the average bear when it comes to clouds given you guys operate in the cloud. And obviously I have some very specific expertise in that space but and you said you were pretty diligent in your research and how you investigated these other vendors and things like that um you know I guess you know Garth you if you look at something you can obviously evaluate it very differently than then somebody else might be able to say that were CFO or even some CIOs that haven't necessarily been operating in the cloud paradigm.
So I guess what advice would you give them of how they can kind of compare these differences because there is exactly what you described right there are true cloud offerings like NetSuite but there are a number of others that are hosted or you know single tenant or you know they claim they're clouds just but cloud watch. How would you advise those folks?
Garth: I mean that so the days you get a true hosted or a true cloud offering versus a hosted or a single tenant or an instance like that is the code base. And what you really never want to do and then the ERP system is get stuck on a code base of ages because that's what kills you on your few systems. I worked with Oracle, I work of SAP over to all of them and after they aged awhile, you have to do updates and stuff like that. It's a painful process. it's scary your customizations are at risk. It creates a ton of ongoing work and stress for your IT group or your ERP group if your company is not set up to manage that stuff.
And so, the number one factor is you know it needs to be a single codebase that all the customers run on that allows customizations that are guaranteed to roll forward. And they need a consistent release cycle of features that every customer gets and if it doesn't have that if anybody says hey you know we have this instant thing where we'll put up an instance for you or you know it's a single tenant type all they're doing is they're taking their old code which is not updated which is not a modern codebase they've hacked it and put it together in such a way that they're hosting it on servers but all those problems exist. They're just trying to hide them under the rug from you. They have their IT teams dealing with it.
The API's are probably even the older API’s and not nearly as robust and we'll defined as API's for modern architectures are and you're gonna run into all the connection and kind of use issues you would on older systems. It's just that they're IT team is dealing with a lot of that pain instead of yours but from the technology side I don't want that my company moves very quickly we you know we change corners or go around corners at Lightspeed basically and I need to know that the architecture that I'm on is not gonna hold me down and as we continue growing and using modern standards and modern ideas of design and there's kind of hard to explain to non-engineers but I need your IT out there should understand what I'm saying it's fundamentally code that is written for the cloud is expected to behave in different ways than code that was written to be on premise.
It's been moved to the cloud and the devil is in the details. You start doing a lot of the implementations and writing your own code to pull data to and from them. That's when you can really run into problems with older code bases because they're not designed for that.
Ron de Beauvoir: Is everything that is that your essential your IT infrastructure ISM with all cloud essentially from what you guys do?
Garth: Yeah so when I took over the infrastructure you know that everything was on premise and we had exchange and outlook and you know kind of a hybrid Linux based Microsoft stuff. And having run IT for about twenty plus years, one of the first things I was trying forgot is like where are the pain points. How you minimize this and as the cloud services out there became more robust you get more for your money by going with a well-developed and well run cloud service than you almost ever can internally just because the IT resources to manage these services internally are actually really high and the stress level is really high to keep them up because expectations now for users is you know 99.9% uptime.
They want to use it from home, they want to use it from work, they want to use it from you know grandma's house when they're out at Thanksgiving. You know the expectation is they can access their data anywhere at any time and if you're running on premise that's a really hard order to fulfill. Plus, they're running on Windows they're running on surface. They're running on you know Android Mac Linux you know everything and so it has to be especially for our environment where we are such a Linux based company, we have such a mix of users and customers. Is it web-based? If it's not web-based it's tied down to an OS, it just becomes a nightmare for my IT team to try and manage and deal with.
So, at this point I would say 80 to 90% of the services that we use our web-based and SAS services to the point now that I have more integrators , programmers, engineers on my IT team then I do actually desktop or traditional IT people because we do more integrations of services now than we do of maintaining servers.
Ron de Beauvoir: You know I don't know you know one of the questions is kind of come in and one of the one of the folks was struggling just trying to understand somehow. They get that they get a sense of the business benefits of NetSuite versus SAP and yeah and I don't know if you can if you can kind of talk to that a little bit but you know if you have a sense you know when you guys are obviously evaluating these two you're obviously you're moving for an old version of SAP be looking at the new versions versus NetSuite. You know how did you guys evaluate those two and you know what we're what were some of the business benefits of the of the two?
Garth: So, cost was the most obvious one. So, the cost of implementing NetSuite was a fraction of implementing SAP and can be done in a much shorter timeframe. So the absolute minimum timeframe that using consultants could we were not we would not have been able to do SAP implementation ourselves but working with consultants at the absolute minimum timeframe. We had four bare-bones implementations was six to eight months and that was pushing things so that was too long for us and expensive.
The implementation costs alone of SAP was more than what we ended up paying for the implementation and licenses for NetSuite. Then we added the licenses and in the recurring licenses for what we were currently paying for SAP was actually the just the support alone. Two-thirds of the costs of what we ended up implementing and our first year of NetSuite so there's a huge cost savings and the efficiency gain was immediate and obvious I think at least a 30% gain for our Finance Group because SAP was cumbersome. It's dated the interface and the way it works it's not it takes us a moderate to significant amount of training to get people up to speed. And time to get them kind of productive and what we found with NetSuite is with kind of an initial training and then a follow-up training about a month later that especially the finance team was more productive right off the bat.
I'm right out the gate they liked the application. A user acceptance is a huge problem. With a few systems they're not a lot of one matures. The older ones are not really fun to use; they're not intuitive, they kind of don't follow modern standards design a lot of them. NetSuite was nice to use the point where people actually you know we're not complaining about it. They found it pleasant, easy to use easy to follow and see the data that's so hard. So, I mean that gets underestimated all the time but when you're doing something and seeing the impact of it and in like why don't you click spill and see hey this just happened.
Let's check the GL oh okay there's a GL. Right that makes sense we're good to go so there's a lot of stuff we are not moving off of Excel. Half of our company is running, and it sells spreadsheets when we’re running on SAP because it's so hard to get data out of SAP and that kind of useful relevant format, we're in NetSuite it was a matter of minutes to get the data out that we needed. It was real time which was also hugely important and so from our CFO loved it from day one she said it was a complete win for her and her team and within a year of our implementation we had numbers. You know kind of matching our other system.
We have a an order management system that generates orders and stuff so we can I have two systems that kind of track what we build and sell and with SAP, we could never get them synched up we could never get them within you know three or four margin points. And there's always wild swings you can never figure out which one within the first year we had them like almost perfectly synced up. And if there's any deviation it would just take minutes to go in and track where that deviation arose from and why it happened. The clarity of data in NetSuite far surpasses any art pieces whatever used.
Ron de Beauvoir: And that that's just a huge win for any organization right there Garth and I may have been incentives and I just want to come back to it. Is um how long now have you guys been using the platform three years, four years okay and so you can approve three or four I guess you're good too. Right almost eight upgrades, I guess so far above NetSuite. What and have you guys changed your usage of the I guess can you talk a little bit about what all you use NetSuite and has that expanded? Has that changed over that timeframe?
Garth: Yeah, it's expanded lot. So, we do pretty much a full financial and you know manufacturing inventory work order with revenue recognition. You know GL invoicing um pretty much all the core stuff for company is run through it. Now we started out relatively light especially on the operation side because we were trying figure out how to get it to work with what we did. What we did is our model didn't quite fit in the NetSuite models and what we do is a lot. Right we have a service offering we have a software offering. We build hardware we integrate hardware.
We have consulting professional services and we have like ongoing recurring managed services. So, we have a lot of different areas that we play in and so we started relatively simple and clean on the original implementation and then as we've seen new modules as we understand the system our users knows like hey does it do this thing you know no we contact NetSuite oh yes it can do that. If you add you know X module or Y module and so we've added, you know budgeting. We've done a much more for travel and expense integration. Purchasing I think is one of the next things we're looking at adding on. We added on whip this year so we kind of have a continual upgrading integration path and that nice thing about NetSuite is it's really easy to do these implementations.
They're you know they're not stressful. It's a month or so of planning. It's an implementation, it's training and we're kind of off to the races and good to go again. So the implementation time and time it takes to actually add new features or change existing features to match business needs, it's literally a matter of days two weeks to do this compared to months, multiple months when I was on SAP to try and get it done. And we can do it in-house most of the time that's really helped.
Ron de Beauvoir: So, then are you guys leveraging NetSuite for all the kind of some of the manufacturing the assemblies and things like that?
Garth: Yep. Wow alright so we have a and you know we wrote all of our integrations and customizations ourselves to do this but from our order management system which is you know basically configure a PC or configure server, add drives and what motherboard and you know all those kind of bits. it creates the order and NetSuite I think creates the work order and then that goes into whip and we have a change order management process also which integrates the two. So, if there's a change order either done on the NetSuite side or on our order side. There's the two kind of sync up. It can lock an order if it needs to you know be locked and not shipped before the change is made then all the way through to you know shipping and invoicing. RMA's everything. it's all handled to it and it’s night and day difference and being on at city on how will we contract just everything that goes on in the system. And every bit that goes in and out the door now. We can generally track, and it makes sense.
Ron de Beauvoir: I think my only last kind a big question. I want to ask to you Garth is just you know what’s next. As you guys see about where you want to go with Penguin. I mean obviously you guys are continuing to expand quite a bit, but you know what you guys see is next in terms of what you're doing with NetSuite and kind of how you look to expand your usage there?
Garth: So, you know those are our kind of challenge rounds coming up in future. Ours are little business is growing significantly. We kind of are in the process of opening up our first office in London. You know we do a lot of business in Japan and we're looking at some other countries. Also, we're starting to grow in and so we might have to do you know do the global foot sales for uh NetSuite One World. There you have One World, so you know that that's on the table for next year probably or the year after.
At the latest advanced purchasing and then really dialing in what we have, we had such an explosive year and growth right now that we're still kind of recovering from that and figuring out ok you know how we update the system to manage that. And that was some amazing things like real-time while it was happening the issue, we realized that one of our kind of new business branches needed to be handled differently. As far as the way we've built the servers and handle them that the current the current method that we've used up till now didn't work. It only took us about two weeks to look at the system design to figure out how to implement this new entirely new build process into our system. And then another two weeks to implement it so in a month from start to end we pretty much implemented an entire new build whip design process in the system, and I came here.
Imagine how we would have done that in SAP. We could not have done in SAP. There's just no way we've done it without NetSuite. it was amazingly clean and how it ended clean and clear on how we did it and that's what you need for a tool today. That's like why we're on NetSuite, a tool that you can adapt and change to match how your business changes in real time.
Ron de Beauvoir: You can't wait months and six months for implementations anymore so yeah makes sense. I really appreciate the perspective. I’m going to just give just one you know if there is anyone else that have any other questions out on the line definitely one of them you know give you give you that quick opportunity if you do otherwise we'll wrap it up. We did have one I think we I got I got a little geeked out Garth and started to go down into the geek City with you and someone was uh was feeling a little too deep down for us so I tried to bring it back a little bit but I you know I don't think there's any other questions that are out there.
I think I've tried to answer most of those so I appreciate you know most of the question that you most of your responses here have been able to answer that but one other question that is here that I did want to answer is what's the smallest small business that could handle in NetSuite?
This is um the question I get often asked this question, particularly from smaller companies but also from larger companies and the short answer to this is really we have companies as small as two people using NetSuite all the way to you know multi-thousands. NetSuite itself uses NetSuite so we're over work literally over 5,000 plays using this week but what we find is it's not necessarily it's not a that you have too few employees that you'll be overloaded because you get out of it what you need. And what I found is these smaller companies are able to realize a lot of free up a lot of time and benefits that they aren't having to deal with systems. Even the typical systems they can get those maintained leveraging NetSuite.
So I don't know if that answers the question but hopefully it does I think you know Garth I just wanted to thank you for making time for today and for jumping on the call with us. And I want to thank everyone else for making time as well to be on this call with us and if you do have any follow-up questions you know please don't hesitate to reach out.
There this call has been recorded and we'll be sending out a copy of the recording to everyone and it'll be available for replay later. Thanks everyone, thank you.