NetSuite, no doubt timing the announcement for the middle of the Sapphire SAPfest, has announced some of "the latest" companies to select NetSuite (News - Alert) over software provided by SAP.

Distribution Video and Audio, GestureTek and Schaeffer Oil are now using NetSuite's enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and e-commerce offerings "in a single on-demand application ... at a fraction of the cost and administrative overhead of SAP (News - Alert)," company officials say.

Guess their invitations to Sapphire got lost in the mail.

The NetSuite officials gleefully cite "new research from Macro 4, a UK-based global software company," claiming to find "a high degree of risk and complexity involved in most major SAP upgrades," including "the bulk of historical data clogging up their systems ... the time that upgrades consume, the complexity involved and the staffing resources involved."

They also fail to pass up the opportunity to remind you of the July 2008 report by Forrester Research finding the tipping point toward SaaS (News - Alert) adoption is "the upgrade and application management requirements of on-premise" products, such as ... oh, to pick a random example ... SAP.

NetSuite claims that by providing ERP, CRM, and e-commerce in a single product, companies get a feature set "offered by legacy software developers, including multi-language, multi-currency international operations, full controls and compliance enforcement, and a 360-degree view of customers and prospects."

For those companies "already deeply reliant on SAP products" looking to switch to SaaS," NetSuite OneWorld for SAP offers integration for subsidiaries and corporate divisions which need their own capabilities "while maintaining transparency with the central system of record."

Last month TMC reported that NetSuite announced a series of partner applications bringing their business application computing cloud together with that of Salesforce.com (News - Alert).

"SuiteCloud Connect for Salesforce.com" connects the NetSuite and Salesforce.com cloud platforms, the idea being to let Salesforce.com customers integrate their Customer Relationship Management processes with the on-demand Enterprise Resource Planning and e-commerce functionality of NetSuite.