Oracle Says It Won’t Change NetSuite Product Prices, Structure

But he notes Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison helped found NetSuite and was its biggest investor with a 41 percent share of the company, a position that stands to earn Ellison a cool $2.48 billion in cash. “Ellison has a close relationship with NetSuite and that should quell customer concerns, at least in the short term,” said King.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson was notably absent from the event, but Hurd said Nelson is staying on as an evangelist for the NetSuite cloud suite and ERP. “He’s done a fantastic job with Evan [Goldberg, NetSuite founder] and Jim [McGeever, NetSuite president] and we’re thrilled to have him help us,” said Hurd.

Cloud reminiscing

Goldberg recalled NetSuite was one of first Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing companies  when it was founded in 1998 before those terms were popularized by Salesforce.com and others.

NetSuite was originally called NetLedger and its roots are in financial applications. “Since then we’ve built it out to provide everything you need to run a business,” said Goldberg.

He said a key to the company’s success has been that it’s based on one unified system, on one database and a single global repository for all a company’s core business processes.

“A customer using a Web store or a collections person are all working with exactly the same data and it flows seamlessly,” said Goldberg. “Larry Ellison had the vision to deliver application business services over the Web and we’ve spent 18 years delivering cloud applications. We’re excited to share our best practices with Oracle.”

NetSuite President Jim McGeever said that as part of Oracle, NetSuite can now scale much faster than before, particularly internationally. As an independent company McGeever said NetSuite sometimes had to focus on things that were more important to investors than customers.

“For example, it was important we show a growth in the number of billings, how many invoices we were processing,” said McGeever. “That’s not really the most important metric, but that’s how we were being measured. I’m excited that now our focus is exclusively on serving customers and expanding our product’s capabilities.”

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Originally published on eWeek