Steve Ratcliffe

Surrey, UK

Commercial Director

My company has been using Netsuite SaaS for a couple of years now and I just cannot see any significant issues which need to be overcome other than the reluctance of CIOs to commit to the principle of having their data in the cloud as opposed to on magnetic media on their premises. My experience is that the sales resistance is mostly a mental issue.

The issue of integration with other systems is certainly no more difficult to deal with in the case of SaaS than it would have been with on premise software. SOAP to the rescue. We integrated Netsuite with a piece of legacy software with no diffuclty at all and with rock solid reliability.

My only criticism is that the user interface (as a result of access via the web to a server 5000 miles away) isn't quite as snappy as it might be if the server were on my LAN but I have used local software which is appreciably worse. In return for the slight downsides, one gets reliability and redundancy my business couldn't afford on its own plus access from anywhere on anything from a phone to a web tablet in a warehouse.

In short, I'd say that the issues were easily worth the minor inconveniences.