NetSuite Replaces Peachtree at Helio

By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

A variation on the Siebel-salesforce.com practice of announcing customer wins THAT THE OTHER GUY DIDN'T GET is to announce when a company rips out someone else's stuff to install yours.

That's what NetSuite did as they announce this morning that Helio Solutions, Sun Microsystems' largest West Coast integrator ("sun," "helio," get it?) ripped out Peachtree and a proprietary CRM to install NetSuite "for its front- and back-office needs."

Helio's deployment of NetSuite to all 60 of its employees "has helped the company bring order to its fast-growing operations," NetSuite officials claim: "With NetSuite, Helio has reported increased productivity and efficiency savings of 20% in its support staff and 40% revenue growth from $53 million to $88 million."

That revenue ranks Helio Solutions in the top half of the VARBusiness 500 list of the industry's largest value-added resellers.

"Previously using Peachtree for accounting and a proprietary CRM package for sales, marketing and customer support, Helio Solutions ran into some challenges," NetSuite officials say. "The company outgrew entry-level accounting and CRM solutions; reporting and forecasting were cumbersome, time-consuming and error prone; and no central repository of data supported sales and marketing teams' initiatives."

Shockingly, they decided to replace the stuff. "After evaluating a few other software packages such as SAP and salesforce.com," -- no, it doesn't say if they tried Oracle -- Helio bought NetSuite.

Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite said businesses "don't have the time, money or desire to go through the pain of integrating disparate ERP and CRM systems." He's got that right: A recent Forrester report finds that "integration remains the bane of CRM projects," in Kimberly Hill's words: "Only 29 percent of the executives surveyed by Forrester reported being satisfied with how well their CRM suite integrates with other sources of data in their organizations."

It's not hurting sales all that much, however. Forrester finds an inexhaustible reservoir of faith in CRM and its promises, predicting that companies will spend a total of $13 billion on CRM initiatives in 2005.

But as Hill says, only 25 percent of that total -- $3.2 billion this year, up from $3 billion last year -- will go toward software licensing, with most of the money earmarked for integration, administration and maintenance.

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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:

http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100005&nm=David%20Sims

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