The NetSuite Story

that's no excuse. Let's get on with the show. So Sweet World eighteen is a big conference that's hosted by net Sweet, which in turn is now a division of Oracle. But net Sweet did not start out that way, and so I want to give you the story of net Sweet. Also letting you know this bonus episodes a little shorter than my normal episodes, largely because well, there are limitations to what I can do with hotel WiFi and getting these sound files out to my super producer, Tari. So

that's the reason for that. But let's talk all about net Suite. What is this company? Was it due? Where did it come from? Well, it's a company that makes products for other companies products and services, so it's a business to business enterprise. Most of us would likely have no real experience with net suite unless we work in some company that is relying on net sweets products. Otherwise

we don't really have contact with it. It's one of those companies that works behind the scenes, and these business to business companies often when you start digging into it on the service level, they seem really complicated and sometimes it seems like there's nothing there in relation to what we do in our normal lives. But then when you really look in you realize, wait a minute, these are the companies that do work that allow the other companies that I am familiar with, the ones that I do

interface with directly to do their work. So you can think of net sweet as one of the companies that creates those products that allow other companies like retail companies, service companies to do what they do, and that's why you have the experience you do working with those companies, at least on a on a grand level before you get really granular. So net sweets story begins with its founder, Evan Goldberg. Goldberg was adopted at birth. He grew up

in Lexington, Massachusetts. As a young boy, he became interested in math and uh. By fifth grade he was already into programming and he really took to it so much so that that became his main focus. He attended Phillips Academy and over, and later he attended Harvard. He had scholarships with both. He graduated from Harvard with a degree and applied mathematics. Very smart guy, and a lot of people describe him as being extremely talented when it comes

to applied mathematics and coding. In fact, there are stories about his days at net Suite, even as an executive, where he was right there in the trenches with other developers working on the code, and many people, many of the developers said, well, he codes faster than anyone else here. Uh. And he served as chief technology officer for net Suite through much of its history. So right out of college he got the nod to come and work for the

Oracle Corporation. And I'll talk about Oracle in a subsequent podcast kind of give you the Oracle story because it's also very interesting. But in general, Oracle is a computer technology corporation that started back in nineteen seventy seven and it's one of the largest software makers in the industry. It's kind of like right behind Microsoft. One of the founders of Oracle, Larry Ellison, played a very important role

when that suite, becoming its largest investor. Goldberg worked for UH Oracle for UM in various capacities for several years until he decided then to strike out on his own and he founded a web development firm called imbed Software and that's m b E D no no uh E. At the beginning of that, Goldberg's operation was relatively small. He didn't have a whole lot of people working for him, maybe like fifteen or so. But even so, he found

it challenging to operate the business successfully. And one of the things that frustrated him was that unlike big companies, which had access to very complex software kits that allowed them to do things like track customers and do pay roll and all this kind of stuff, he found that small business owners didn't really have those options there. There weren't a whole lot of assets out there that they could use, especially ones that would be affordable to a

small business. Most of the solutions out there were meant for big, big companies, and therefore they cost a lot of money. So your typical small business couldn't really afford to invest in those software kits. And so he thought, well, wait a minute, there's actually an opportunity here. You could create a solution for these small to mid sized companies

that is more cost effective for them. So he called up his buddy Larry Ellison in and he pitched the idea of creating a customer relationship management or CRM product for small businesses. Now, Ellison reportedly told Goldberg that it might be easier to start out with a financial based solution for small businesses, so essentially accounting software, start with that and then grow from there. And further, he made the suggestion of making the product web accessible, meaning it

would become a software as a service offering. And I talked about that in the cloud computing episodes. But software as a service is this idea that you don't go out and buy a software package to live on your computer. Instead, you pay a subscription to allow you access to software that lives on another computer, the provider's computer, and you can take advantage of the software. You can use it all you like, but you don't have it living on your computer. Now, this can bring the cost of the

software down on a per month basis. Like, if you look at how much the software costs up front, it might be thousands of dollars for these enterprise solutions. But if you can bring that down to a smaller amount per month, while over the lifetime of your use of the software, you're likely to spend more money than if you were just to buy it outright. Uh, the monthly cost is much lower than the upfront one time cost

of buying the software. Plus you don't have to worry about the software going out of date and then having to buy an upgrade because is the software is being operated by the provider and they're making all the updates on the back end. You get to enjoy that without having to do it yourself. So Ellison was really forward thinking here. This is when software is a service really

hadn't become a thing yet. So Goldberg followed Ellison's advice and he launched a company out of San Mateo, California, towards the end of nine and he called it net Ledger, And he also took some of Ellison's money, actually a lot of it, ultimately more than a hundred million dollars of it. So Larry Ellison was a major stakeholder in

this private company. After making that large startup investment and a couple of subsequent investments, Goldberg gathered a team and built an accounting software solution that had a web based interface, and it was ready to go in early nine. The starting price for using it when it first launched was four dollars and ninety five cents per month, So and you figure that out, that's you know, around sixty dollars a year. For sixty dollars a year, you can have

access to this accounting software. When the actual if you want to go out and buy like an enterprise level accounting software kit, it might cost hundreds of dollars. So for some companies this would make a whole lot of sense. Now, the early net Ledger application started to leverage Oracles database technology. That was one of the parts of the deal that was made early on. Another sign that the two companies

were rather tightly coupled. At that point. The company announced it was working on additional features right out of the gate. So even when they were launching this accounting software, they said, hey, this is not the only thing that we're ever going to offer. We're going to include other features, and they're all going to be integrated together. So it's not just that we're going to have a software kit for one

aspect of your business or another. We're gonna have an integrated approach of solutions so they all work with each other.

This was looking at another problem that companies were having, which is that you would typically get one type of software to handle one part of your businesses operations like accounting, and you might have a different software package to handle something like payroll, and you might have a different one to track sales, and a different one for customer relationship management.

And many of these software packages they might be from different providers, which means they're not necessarily uh compatible with one another, that it's not easy to share information across them, which means you have to generate reports out of all of them and then compare them and then figure out what your best approaches and do a lot of data

analysis of your own. And so the promise net Ledger was trying to make was saying, what we're gonna do has come out with a suite of programs, a suite of features that all are designed from the beginning to be interoperable so that you can easily share information across different functions of your business and make it easier for you to be able to do what you need to do,

especially as you get bigger. And again they're kind of marketing this too small to midsize company, saying, why should you have to struggle when large companies have been solving these problems for years with very expensive software packages. Let's

set this up. So the company announced it was working on UH features like linking e store transactions directly with accounting software, so, in other words, there'll be no need to have two tracking systems, one for the sales that you're making an e stores and then a separate one for accounting where you'd have to port over the results from one to the other. The whole approach would be integrated, which sounds pretty standard today, but again at the time,

that was pretty revolutionary for these sized companies. Meanwhile, Mark Bennioff, who was another former Oracle executive, got a similar idea to Goldberg right around the same time. In fact, and about a month after net Ledger launched, he launched salesforce dot com, and salesforce dot com did have customer relationship

management as its primary focus. The thing that Goldberg had suggested when he called up Ellison, and you could argue that net sweet was the first real cloud computing company, the first real commercial cloud commuting company out there was pretty much net suite, but salesforce dot Com ended up making the bigger impact. It grew faster, it got a

lot more attention. If you look online for stories about the history of cloud computing like I did, Salesforce dot Com pops up way more frequently than net Suite does for those stories. Oh and uh, Ellison also invested money in salesforce dot Com too, so spreading your bets back

to net Ledger. Gradually, Goldberg and his team began to add in other features in addition to accounting, and again they were all meant to help those smaller businesses managed various operations through a more centralized approach, and it follows into a category of products eventually, at least one of the offerings called Enterprise resource Planning or e r P, in which a system allows business operators the chance to get kind of a holistic view of what's going on

behind the scenes of their companies. I'll talk more about the ARP a bit later and go into greater detail about what that entails, but it's really big stuff. I mean, it's stuff that's when you try to wrap your mind around it, When you just start to consider how complex it is, you realize that a tool that automates this

could be really, really useful if it's implemented properly. Now, Oracle would end up licensing that Ledger's product under the name Oracle Small Business Suite for a short while, but that experiment didn't last terribly long, and eventually they kind of dropped that branding. In two thousand one, s Net ran a review for Oracle Small Business Suite seven point oh, and at that time, net Ledger wasn't just accounting, it was also handling, sales tracking, customer inquiry, us saying, and more.

But the review concluded that the then price of nine per month was pretty steep for the small businesses that the company was targeting, and that unless a business needed all the features that were offered in the suite, it would make more sense to stick with smaller software packages like quick books. So essentially, what sen was saying was, sure, if you need all these features, then maybe a month

makes sense. But if all you're looking for is the accounting side, then just go out and get accounting software. Don't bother with going with a sweet approach. The review also criticized the speed of the application, saying that desktop based software was generally faster. Not a big surprise that a web based UH offering was slower than a desktop one, especially when you start considering things like internet speed and

bandwidth and things of that nature. So seen Ne gave the product seven out of ten, so it wasn't exactly a disastrous review, but it didn't really do net Ledger any favors in those early days. But the team kept working on improving features and later reviews were a little more positive. They had a lot going against them at

that time. The cloud computing business strategy was largely unproven, and to make matters worse, they launched right at the very beginning of the period we call the dot com crash, in which multiple web based startups had launched and then fizzled away, mostly after failing to prove they could operate as a revenue generating business, in other words, that they

could actually make up profit. There were so many startups that people were excited about in those early days that had not a come up with an effective business plan. They had big ideas of what they wanted to do, but they didn't really have a way of managing it, and certainly not growing and scaling the business in a

way that was managed that that was sustainable. And so as a result, you had a lot of these companies flash on the get a huge amount of investment money poured into them, burn through that investment money in ridiculous amounts of time, and then collapse in on themselves. So a lot of companies failed. Two of them that didn't wear net Ledger and its rivals Salesforce dot Com. They were both able to survive that era, but lots of

other companies weren't so fortunate. Now you can listen to some of my older episodes about the dot com crash and the companies that did not make it if you like. There are tons of them in the Tech Stuff archives, and they are interesting stories, filled with useful warnings about startup behavior in general. In fact, a lot of analysts like the point to the dot com crash and say, do you remember when this happened? Maybe we should be a little more cautious with these unicorns they're popping up

in Silicon Valley. Now I've got a little bit more to say about net Suite, actually a lot more, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In July two thousand two, Zack Nelson joined the net Ledger team as the CEO of the company. Nelson had also worked with Oracle in the past, so continuing the Oracle association with net sweet but he had worked at other places too, including McAfee, Sun Microsystems, and Motorola. Interestingly,

Nelson's degrees aren't in business. He attended Stanford and earned degrees in biological sciences and anthropology, and then became a CEO of a cloud based tech company. Wow, I'm just saying I've got an English let degree if you want to make me CEO of a multibillion dollar company, although I doubt I could do nearly as good a job

as Zach Nelson did. In September two thousand three, net Ledger officially would change its name to net Suite and would become the company that we now know, although now, of course it's a division within Oracle. The company had been offering a product called net Suite already. Uh that was essentially the same sort of offering that was the Oracle small busy in a suite, and this indicated that they were really going with software as a service beyond

just accounting. That they didn't want to have net Ledger indicate that they only were interested in accounting, that they were doing other things. So at this point the company services could also handle marketing department needs in addition to the other ones that already talked about, and gradually net Suite was adding in all the standard processes and departments

you would find in mid sized businesses. Now that sweets value proposition was that it could offer up all the services that a company might need, eliminating the necessity of investing in those different products for various functions. So again they were saying, here's a holistic, integrated approach that you can use that will make everything much more streamline. That was what they were trying to sell to customers, and

that you could easily share stuff across departments. You could increase the interdepartmental communication within your business so that you have someone in one department saying, well where are the numbers of UH sales, so that we can plan our our our strategies, like if it's marketing and sales. All of this would be integrated so that if you were using the net suite tools, you could call up the

reports you needed and make your decisions there. You didn't have to worry about waiting on somebody else to send you the information you needed. At least that was the again sales pitch. As the suite of features grew, so did the fee to access them, which led some other analysts to echo what c net had said in two thousand one, and namely that the company was pricing themselves out of their target customer base of those small to

mid sized companies. By the mid two thousand's, cloud computing was starting to come into its own in the business world. Net Suite continued to grow, though not as quickly as its rivals salesforce dot com. The company eventually began to add more services and features. Uh, they fall into some really big categories. So I'm gonna talk about those categories now, and I'm gonna give a little more detail about some

stuff I've already mentioned. So first, let's start with customer relationship management, because that was the one Evan Goldberg had in mind originally when he pitched his idea to Larry Ellison back in It was the idea that Salesforce dot Com went with in and we frequently initialize this category to c r M. It's all about how a company interacts with its customers, so the name is pretty self

explanatory Customer relationship management. So those customers might be other businesses, or you know, they might be real life human being type people like me and you or you and me, or you and I or or all of us Google che we are the Walrus CRM is about learning what your customers like and don't like about your products and services. It's about improving customer satisfaction and therefore customer retention, and

ultimately it's about driving more sales to customers. Not keep in mind we are talking about businesses here, so at the end of the day, the purpose of a business is to make money doing whatever it is that the business does. So while customer satisfaction is very important, it's typically done with the view of how can I sell more to this person? Just so that you don't get

too any warm, fuzzy feelings about customer service. Uh, but it is important and obviously companies that have great customer service are more likely to retain a customer and to encourage that customer to purchase more and more than a

company that has really crappy customer service. I'm sure you've all had good and bad experiences with customer service with various companies, and I'm sure in many cases that has led to changes in your behavior, whether it meant stepping away from a company because you didn't like the way you were treated, or sticking with a company becoming a loyal customer because the way that they did treat you.

That sweets product has lots of features to track customer behaviors to give analyst the chance to figure out what's going on nearly in real time. So ideally this would give a company the chance to address any problems quickly or capitalize on working strategies to maximize their impact. Now, this is more complicated than it sounds because there's so many potential points of contact between a company and its customers.

So they're the obvious points, like a company's website. So if there are feedback forms on the website, that's a clear case where you're getting communications from your customers. But there could also be phone lines, which means you have representatives and you have to incorporate their reports into your information. There could be an email contact, there could be social media accounts, so it all starts to add up with

a really good CRM solution. Ideally, you would be able to get a pretty big, high level view of what the overall customer perception is of your company's business, like what does the average person think about what you do? And if it's great, then you know you're doing well and that you should really concentrate on those strategies. And if it's not, so, you know that you have an

image problem and you need to fix it. And that image problem might be on the surface or it might be indicative of a very serious brutial problem at the core of your business. Either way, this is one of those methods where you can actually get that indication and then respond to it so you can blame your strategies accordingly based upon what your customers think about you. Then

there's the e commerce side of net suite. These are tools that are meant to help integrate online sales with traditional point of sale tools to help a business keep an accurate tally of all sales across all platforms. So let's say that you own a business that sells I don't know, fidget spinners that that trend is almost over, so let's go ahead and talk about that. You've got in on the tail end of the fidget spinner craze, but you're you're really hoping that it comes back, kind

of like Yo Yo's do every few years. So you have a big storefront in um Times Square, New York, and you also have your online store, and you want to be able to see how sales are doing both at the physical retail spot and online. So if you have a software kit that can integrate all that information, you can actually see the total sales both online and in your physical storefront. You could break it out by looking at online only storefront only. You could possibly even

break it out further like online only by region. So depending upon the software that you're using for e commerce, you could be able to get really granular and you might see, oh, well, there's this one particular place that's doing really really well, and there's this other place where sales are are dragging behind. I should look into seeing why that is. And there could be lots of different

reasons for that, right. It could just be that there's no market for fidget spinners in that other region, or it could be that you don't have enough sales people in that region, and that's why your sales figures are low. It could be that there was some sort of back end error where maybe there was a manufacturing problem or a shipping problem. So there's lots of different things that

could indicate why those sales are low. This is also another reason why that integrated approach is one of the big selling points that net suite hits over and over

again when they're marketing to customers. They say, you know, any piece of information is valuable, but it's way more valuable when you pair it with all the other information and when you can actually see what is the cause of that, because if you only have these individually, if you have these, you know, separated out and there's no context, you can't necessarily be sure why the information has turned out the way it is. So that's one of their

big selling points that they have for their customers. There's also human capital management or HCM. I personally find the phrase human capital to be really icky. I don't think I don't. I don't like thinking of people in terms of being assets to a company because it seems dehumanizing to me. But hey, that's me being all hippie dippy. The important thing about these features is that they centralize human resource operations and payroll, so as companies grow, it

becomes more difficult to track all of that stuff. And the promised net Suite makes to its customers is that their product will keep things simple even as the company gets more complicated, and the software generates reports on demand and gives managers a chance to look for outliers that might be the result of a mistake, or they might indicate an under or overperforming employee and thus allow you

to address that further. Um then there's professional services automation or p s A that's all about project management and resource allocation. There are a lot of businesses out there that operate on the principle of billable hours. I used to work in consulting, and in those days, you were supposed to build all of your hours to whichever projects you were working on. So if you were working on project day for four hours in the day, he would write that down, and then maybe you spent two hours

on project B, so you would write that down. You're supposed to keep track of all of that information because all of that would be build to the client, or sometimes it's all internal billing where it it doesn't ever go necessarily to an outward client, but it's a way for a company to keep track of what employees are doing, what projects are working on, which projects are taking up the most in assets. Again, there's that word to refer to human beings as assets um and it's a way

of just tracking what's going on. So uh, that was part of what p s A covers. And finally there's the enterprise resource planning or e r P section. I talked about this just briefly earlier. These are all the back end operations of business needs to handle, like inventory, shipping, billing, and more. And obviously that that applies mainly to businesses that are dealing with actual physical products, but services based businesses they also have to work with inner enterprise resource planning.

So as business businesses grow, this gets way more complicated. You could be dealing with multiple warehouses, manufacturing plants, retail locations, so you have to figure out how to manage all those moving pieces to make the stuff you make and get it to the people who want it. And it can also include functions like quality control. So if it turns out your brand new fidget spinner has a tendency

to burst into flames. When you spin it counterclockwise, you'll know and then you can address it before it becomes a huge problem. You can put a hold on them and find out what the underlying issue is and fix it. Features might include things like sending reports to various managers to clear out bottlenecks or put a hold on shipments while you work to resolve problems and think it's even

more complicated when you start operating in other countries. And one of the other things the company has worked to keep up with is the changing nature of business. Now, I mentioned going international just a second ago, but a few years ago that was something only really big companies could do. Is when you reached a certain level of growth, then you could start looking into expanding operations into other countries. But with the Internet, it's way easier to extend to

presence into new markets in different countries. At least it's easier in that the Internet gives people a potential point of contact. Actually doing business in other countries gets a lot more complicated because of multiple factors that you have to consider. So again, let's talk about you and your

fidget spinners. Like your fidget spinners are doing really well for some reason, the trend has come back into vogue, and you start having to ask yourself a lot of questions, like, you wanna explore the possibility of of opening up operations in other countries. So does it make sense to continue

making your fidget spinners in your main manufacturing facility. So in our hypothetical example, let's say that you've got your manufacturing facility and um, Hey Hira, Georgia, Ray Stevens call out fidget spinner capital of the hypothetical situation, Hey Hira, Georgia. If you do keep your manufacturing centralized in Hey Hira, Georgia, it means that you'll be shipping all those fidget spinners

overseas to your international markets. Now, that obviously is going to increase the cost per spinner that you are incurring and that will eat into your profits. Or does it make more sense for you to either build or partner with a manufacturing facility in the country or countries you

want to do business with. And if so, that requires more management, but it might cut down on other costs, including shipping costs, because if you're closer to your destination, you don't have to ship things as far, so there are lots of other matters to consider, like foreign currencies, what's the exchange rate? How are you how is that

going to affect your business? Also, taxes, different countries and even different regions within some countries have different tax laws, so you have to know all of these in order to price your fidget spinners properly and make sure you're still making a profit. And then there are localization issues to consider. So let's say the country you've got your sights on is um Germany. They seem like they'd be really big into fidget spinners. That's a fun loving country.

So to make things go more smoothly, it would be good to have your business localized so that German customers can operate easily with your storefront, which means having a German language website, and it means having some Germans speaking people to communicate uh, so that you're when people talk to your company, you can talk back with them, so you want to have some sort of localized support there.

It may also mean developing tailored customer relationship strategies for German customers because you may find out that people in different parts of the world behave differently that you can't just use the exact same customer relationship approach across the world. It might work in one part and not in another. Now, take this imaginary scenario and then expand it to an operation that's trying to go worldwide. So how do you

make sure you're serving everyone? Well, that's why companies like net sweet try to come up with strategies that that incorporate these ideas and are supposed to help you be able to implement them. Uh. And of course net suite is not the only one that does this, but I mean, this is the story of net sweet, which is why

I'm talking about it. But it does show you how complicated things can get very quickly as businesses grow, particularly in the Internet age, where we have an unprecedented access to the whole world, so things happen really fast now. And that again is why companies like net suite can offer up services that can look really attractive if you're a business owner who doesn't have experience in these realms.

I've got a little bit more to say about that Suite, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. In two thousand seven, that's Sweet held its initial public offering, meaning it transformed from a private company to a publicly traded one, and when preparing to set the opening price for shares, net Suite actually doubled its initial estimate of

thirteen dollars. The new price of twenty six dollars per share would put the value of the company and more than one and a half billion dollars a Princely some net Suite did not do this increase randomly. The company actually held what is known as a Dutch auction for the I p O. And actually there are two different types of Dutch auctions, and they contradict each other, So I'll explain what the other one is at the end

of this. But when we talk about I p O s, the Dutch auction is a process that a company essentially puts out a question to investors, which is how much stock are you willing to buy? And at what price are you willing to buy it. Then the company takes all that response and they look at it and they figure out what the best opening price of its I

p O stock is based off those results. And this is in an attempt to get the most money on that opening So if say, oh, well, here's the highest amount that someone said they were willing to pay for our stock. So that's that's our upper limit. Here's the lowest one. That sets our low limit. Where do most of them fall in? All right, So it turns out that people are value are stock more than thirteen dollars

per share, so let's go ahead and increase it. And that's how they got to the figure of twenty six dollars per share UH and its first day of trading, the shares ended up trading at twenty seven dollars and cents at the end of the day. That bummed out some shareholders who are really hoping for a first day

surge and value. That frequently happens with I p o s. But then you could argue that that happens with I p o s that undervalued their stock going into trading, and in this case, you could argue that net Sweet pretty much nailed the value of its stock. But for investors that doesn't necessarily come back as a happy news because you may want to have that feeling of a day one pay day where you buy a thousand shares of stock at thirteen dollars and it closes at twenty

six and you've just doubled your money. Uh, that didn't happen. Oh, and I mentioned that Dutch auctions have two meanings, So here's the other one. The other is an auction where you start off with a high price and you gradually bring the price down for an item until someone bids

on the item at the that current price. So you might say, let's auction this painting, starting off at two dollars, and then you might go down by five per a bid and as soon as someone bids on it, once it starts hitting a certain price um, then the auction for that item is over and that person buys it. So instead of starting from a low point and bidding higher, you started a high point and wait until some bidder decides that that's the price they're willing to pay for

whatever the item is. And typically you keep going down until you hit the reserve price of the auction item, and at that point you stop because you wouldn't want to sell for less than what the is actually worth or has been set as a reserve price anyway. Worth is a difficult concept when it comes to auctions. So one thing else I wanted to talk about is that net sweet has acquired a few companies since it launched.

UH since it's IPO in two thousand seven. In two thousand and eight, they bought a company called open Air that specialized in web based expense reports and timesheets. In two thousand nine, net Suite acquired quick Arrow, which created professional services automation products. And other acquisitions include e company Retail Anywhere UH in two thousands thirteen and email service provider Bronte Software in two thousand fifteen, and there were a lot of others as well. But now net Suite

itself is an acquisition or it has been acquired. Back in two thousand sixteen, Oracle announced its intention to purchase net Suite for a cool nine point three billion dollars. Technically, this involved talking with investors and making an agreement to buy back fifty percent of the stocks that were out in circulation, so that Ellison larray Elson would essentially get more control over it because he and his family had

nearly fifty percent of the company. Not quite around and UH, the the deal meant that the UH selling price for that other stock that other people were holding was actually higher than what the trading price was. This is how they were able to buy out the some of the other investors and so it was a deal that was valued at about nine point three billion dollars. Now, Oracle also deals in cloud based solutions for customers, and like I've mentioned, it's had a pretty tight relationship with net

Suite throughout its history. Some analysts pointed out that the acquisition solved a problem that Oracle was running into. Net Sweet had more of a presence with midsized companies, a market that Oracle wanted to really get into, and Oracle and net Suite had been competing a bit in that market, which was weird because Oracle also had the close relationship with net Suite, and according to net Suite executives, the

former company continues to operate as it did before. It's just now a department in the larger Oracle corporation and can take advantage of Oracles technologies and database and huge amounts of information. The acquisition was approved and completed in late twenties sixteen, so net Suite now operates as part of Oracle and has integrated several of its approaches with

Oracle products. And At Sweet World eighteen where I am now, executives talked about new features being added in the one I thought was the most interesting was artificial intelligence meant to help alert managers to extraordinary cases, things that could indicate either someone has committed an error that needs to be addressed or potential strategic moves that could save a

company money. So, for example, you could set up a project that involves manufacturing your fidget spinners in Hamburg, Germany

and shipping them to Berlin. But then you see that the net swite product is telling you that this plan has a low probability of being profitable, and getting that information before you actually commit your sources could help you save tons of money and make you more nimble in the process to actually figure out a working strategy that will make you money, as assuming that the product works as advertised. Of course, I can't speak to that last bit because I've never used net suite. Now, I can

say that they throw a really wild event. The presentations had a DJ mixing up music tracks live before the events even started. There were enormous screens with projections of presentations and live video of presenters. There were lights and smoke effects and acrobats. It's all pretty over the top for an event that was designed to market new features to net sweet customers. Um, I'm not really sure how I feel about these trade shows guys, because it's so weird.

I mean, I'm not the target audience. I'm not a net sweet customer, So I'm looking at this from a very objective point of view, and it is it's a weird spectacle. It's it's not necessarily bad, it's just weird. Uh. There was a lot of humor in the presentations, which I appreciated, including a video about how Evan Goldberg talking, uh, you know, speaking with people over at Oracle and saying, Hey,

I've got this great idea. We're going to announce all of our our new ideas with a viral video, and then the guy at Oracles like, no, please don't do that, and having over it's like, you're right, we should do it. And then it goes out and does this crazy mash up viral video approach, which was extremely dorky, and I

appreciated that because I'm also extremely dorky. So it was an interesting experience attending this conference um and learning more about net Suite, a company I had heard about multiple times but never really looked into. So our next episodes will be about Oracle. We'll talk more about how that company came into being and what it has done over its years. More about Larry Ellison and some of the

trials and tribulations that Oracle has been through. But if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, I highly recommend you get in touch with me. Send me an email. The address for the podcast is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle it both of those is text Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram. And remember, on normal weeks I

broadcast live on twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. You can actually watch me record the podcasts in real time. You get a chance to see the podcast being recorded, you get to hear them usually a couple of weeks before they come out, and you get to see me make mistakes. Plus, there's a chat room you can jump into and chat with other people who are fans of tech Stuff. I hope to see you guys there and

I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com