Study Reveals 74 Percent Of Sage ERP Decision Makers Looking To The Cloud

SAN MATEO, Calif. and LONDON, Oct. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced further findings from recent research conducted by YouGov UK revealing that 74 percent of ERP decision makers in the UK using Sage's business software that were surveyed say they are likely to move to the cloud. In contrast, fewer than 1 in 5 (18 percent) don't see cloud as being important to the success of their company in the future.

The study, which was sponsored by NetSuite, was conducted by YouGov UK earlier in 2013. It questioned 531 ERP decision makers, 187 of which use Sage, in UK businesses with between 50 and 1,000 employees, in roles including CEO, CFO, Owner, Vice President and those in senior and middle management roles. Seventy percent of respondents in the study were Director level or higher.

The study also demonstrates that 44 percent of the Sage ERP respondents didn't believe Sage had a strategy to get them into the cloud. Additionally, these respondents are primarily focused on the IT benefits, rather than the business benefits of the cloud. This highlights the confusion that is being caused by false 'cloud' solutions which are just hosted versions of on-premise software, and therefore only deliver on some of the technical benefits of the cloud rather than the wider business transformation potential.

The top five, IT-focused benefits of moving to the cloud for Sage ERP users were cited as:

1. Ability to access data from anywhere on any device (53 percent)
2. Always running on the latest software version (48 percent)
3. Low IT maintenance costs (45 percent)
4. System updates handled by provider (42 percent)
5. Faster deployment (30 percent)

Business benefits associated with true cloud solutions, such as better insights into business key performance indicators (KPIs) (26 percent), better financial visibility (23 percent), improved business collaboration (29 percent) and more efficient business processes (17 percent) were all significantly further down the list.

Pete Daffern, President of NetSuite EMEA & EVP of Verticals said: "It's interesting that Sage ERP decision makers are so focused on the IT benefits of moving to the cloud, when business benefits such as increased financial visibility have a far greater impact on informed decision making and ultimately the bottom line. We need to see a shift in focus amongst ERP users that the cloud is not just an IT delivery method but a complete business solution."

Some ERP decision makers believe they are already using the cloud, but instead are operating a hairball of legacy on-premise software systems on a hosted platform falsely promoted as cloud, leaving them to struggle to realise the cloud's business benefits. The NetSuite cloud business management software suite, which was built with the internet at its heart, encompasses financials / ERP, CRM, Ecommerce, multi-national business and professional services automation (PSA) all on one integrated platform. It supplies critical real-time visibility and mobility without the high capital costs, painful upgrades, manual data-entry and spreadsheet reconciliations, and ongoing troubleshooting typical of on-premise environments with disparate applications. To learn more, please visit: www.netsuite.co.uk/Sage.

"The fact that ERP decision makers are pre-occupied with the technical promise of cloud speaks to how painful pre-Internet software is for them," continued Daffern. "Once business leaders start to think beyond its technical merits they will be absolutely blown away at the transformative potential it has for the business. This is true both in terms of what cloud can do to drive operational efficiencies in unravelling the hairball of business processes and their associate applications, and also how cloud can deliver vital real-time business insight to support informed decision making for the leaders of the business."

Nick Lally, Financial Director at the fast-growing taxi smartphone app firm Hailo comments: "Although Hailo was only founded 18 months ago, we have seen phenomenal growth and there was no way that Sage's on-premise software could support this. We knew that having a flexible, scalable system was the answer, which is why we moved to NetSuite OneWorld. Of course, we've seen IT benefits such as reducing the amount of time and budget spent keeping software up to date, but more importantly, it's helped us pull all our operations onto one platform, giving us complete visibility of the entire business, no matter how many new countries we expand into in the future."

Today, more than 16,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-class cloud business management suites for divisions of large enterprises and mid-sized organisations seeking to upgrade their antiquated client/server ERP systems. NetSuite excels at streamlining business operations as demonstrated in a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing top 10 financial management systems vendor in the world. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financials suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud is accelerating.

About YouGov 
YouGov (www.yougov.co.uk) is a professional research and consulting organization, pioneering the use of technology to collect higher quality, in-depth data for companies, governments, and institutions so that they can better serve the people that sustain them.

At YouGov America, we leverage our online sampling and research expertise to conduct polls and deliver insights for political, media, university, non-profit, and marketing organizations. Now, as part of a global organization, we can deliver this same expertise on a global scale.

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For more information about NetSuite, please visit www.netsuite.co.uk.

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SOURCE NetSuite Inc.