NetSuite (News - Alert) has announced the latest companies to switch from Microsoft Great Plains to NetSuite.

 

Company officials say the firms switched "largely to take advantage of NetSuite's integration of enterprise resource planning (ERP)/Accounting, customer relationship management and e-commerce capabilities."

 

These new customers, which include CMC Energy Services, Symbiot, Safir Rosetti and Advantage Sign Supply, also cited "advanced functionality and ease of use" as the other compelling reasons for moving to NetSuite.

 

Angelica Biehl, IT Support, Home Energy Tune-UP, a new national residential energy audit program of CMC Energy Services, based in Bethesda, Maryland said her company needed "CRM data integrated with accounting and ERP data."

 

Older generation software applications like Microsoft (News - Alert) Great Plains were once very popular within mid-sized companies, NetSuite officials say, adding that "NetSuite is designed as a single system for ERP, CRM and e-commerce operations."

 

"After a little more than two years of using Great Plains and Salesforce.com (News - Alert), we decided we really needed a completely integrated system to gain better visibility, so we switched to NetSuite," said Ray Jones, Senior VP, Infrastructure/Supply Chain Management, Symbiot, adding that "the ability to access our accounting information along with CRM data from anywhere in the country is a huge benefit for our company.

 

Yesterday Velaro, a vendor of live help for increasing sales, announced the release of Live Chat for NetSuite. The Velarians say it features integration with the NetSuite on-demand business management suite and uses NetSuite's ability to present a 360-degree view of customer information by using core functionality in CRM, ERP and e-commerce.

 

Live Chat for NetSuite is designed to provide real-time visibility to all customer data, as well as documentation of customer support notes and elimination of transferring data from one application to another.

 

The integration of live chat and NetSuite was accomplished using the NetSuite Business Operating System, a set of development and testing tools allowing ISVs to create new applications and whole vertical products using NetSuite's core functionality.

 

By building on and extending the core of NetSuite, Velaro officials say, NS-BOS "increases ISVs' speed-to-market."

 

Among the product's advantages are that Live Chat for NetSuite allows customers to search for or create NetSuite leads and cases in real-time while being in a Velaro live chat session. Upon completion of the chat, each transcript is automatically attached and archived to the associated NetSuite records.