WOW!! It's great to see how this thread has progressed over the past 3 years!! I was one of the original posters on this thread and since my original post in Feb. '05 (when we were first looking for a software to support our inventory, CRM, acctg. and e-commerce) our business is now 4 years old and in this time we've grown our revenues by 4X. 3 years ago when I was first in here looking for a solution this forum was a very big help, so I figured that since I am in "renewal mode" I should post our experiences in here, as they may help others.

We have been a Netsuite user now for just about 3 years and there is plenty of good about the system and a few shortcomings. We are a wholesale company (consumer goods) that wholesales internationally, wholesales domestically in the USA and we also have 2 e-commerce websites (www.slappa.com and www.slappa.co.uk The UK site is NOT on Netsuite but on Monster Commerce)

Netsuite has done a very solid job helping us manage our CRM, basic accounting, and e-commerce. Their user interface is very clean, their dashboards are very good, the ability to drill down on information from every section/report is great, the reporting is sufficient (you could add on crystal reports for additional fees), the CRM is good and we have NEVER had an issue with security OR downtime. Also with Netsuite, I have never worried about disaster recovery because I know they have things covered….this is one thing that I don’t think many buyers consider when trying to choose a solution. Their inventory management does a solid job at providing the basics (multi-locations, reorder levels, real-time levels for the sites). Their sales commissions capabilities are nothing special

The biggest issues we have encountered with Netsuite are:
(a) they are not an open system which creates serious challenges when trying to use Netsuite along with other software (IE they currently do NOT work with outside analytics software because they have an advanced analytics package of their own, yet their analytics cannot provide us with accurate ROI on our PPC campaigns). We have contacted 4 Netsuite integrators and none of them have a sure fire solution to this issue. 2 integrators told us they are now working on an integration, and according to Netsuite they will open the cart code sometime in 2008, but currently there is nothing Netsuite customers can implement to get accurate ROI information on PPC campaigns. This is a very serious issue for any companies that rely on PPC campaigns to drive e-commerce revenue. Another challenge is our desire to implement social networking aspects into our sites. Netsuite needs to address this in a cost effective manner
(b) the cost to add on new licenses or modules is very expensive (we were able to negotiate a great price for the first 10 licenses, yet their costs to add more licenses and modules are absolutely crazy).

Even though we are 80-85% satisfied with Netsuite, our current license term is about to expire and we figured it made sense for us to look at how the market, the players and the offerings have progressed over the past 3 years, and as such we have been, over the past 2 months, scoping out other solutions that may be a better alternative to Netsuite. One thing to point out here with regards to our assessing our options; we value (when evaluating all these companies) who they are. In other words, their management team, their track record and their customers are all factored into our initial decision as to whether or not a company "warrants" our serious consideration. I have seen a few posts in here “assuming” that Netsuite has the potential of being bad because they are a “bigger” company and in my opinion this is a very wrong attitude to have. Netsuite has been around, is backed by Larry Ellison (which certainly has it's bad points) but does tell us that they have the resources to continue to make their product better and unlike some of these other offerings, Netsuite is not going to be a flash in the pan that can go away in the next 12 months. Also now that they are public they are under heavy pressure to grow their business, which means they will have to get aggressive to keep their customers. It’s great that so many new companies have popped up in this space over the past 3-4 years yet we have to try and figure who has staying power and who doesn’t. As such, there are MANY newbie companies that offer solutions in this space that we just cannot consider because we see them as too risky.

So, while this is not an exhaustive list, here are the companies we have considered this time around:

Interprise Suites- I think we all want to love this company. Their website looks slick and gives us the impression that they know what they're doing, they are already on .net and FINALLY here is a software company that says they are for a small business and have actually priced their solution for a small business. But I have read far too many customer issues that seem to all revolve around the fact that this software, while on the right track, is not ready today to "cleanly support" a business like ours. One place from which I have gathered this info is the forum on their website
http://www.interprisesolutions.com/forum. One issue we have encountered with them is trying to get their folks to respond to a request for a demo, and after 2 weeks we still haven’t been able to get a response.
Gary have sent you a PM you so you and I can talk about some of these issues I have read about.

Everest- We have again looked at Everest, and they are still attractive from the standpoint of their software and the pre-sales effort/attention. They are open source so we can do any customization we like, they have a stronger e-commerce offering then Netsuite and they are moving to the .net platform in 2008. I'm not crazy about their user interface and their drill downs are clunky (or I should say not as clean as Netsuite), but to us the biggest issues is still their pricing! while they pitch themselves as a solution for "small" business's, I believe they are priced for companies who are doing at least $4-5 million in revenues. I just read this interview with the Everest president which seems to support this notion http://s29294.gridserver.com/archive...r-choice.html). Relatively speaking, $4-5 million in sales is small business, but I believe these guys, as many other companies offering such software solutions, fail to recognize how many $1-$5 million business's there are who need such a solution. I respect that they feel strongly about their software and as such they take the "we only offer very limited discounts" position, but they still fail to recognize (as do many other vendors) that a $50,000++ initial investment + training, hosting and maintenance fees is a very large investment for a $2million company. I believe if their sales OR marketing group did a study on how many deals they lost to pricing they would take action to correct this.

Based on the great post by Chris_WI on page 8 of this thread, we are now in the process of looking at http://www.mainstreetcommerce.com (haven’t heard back from them yet but when we do I’ll update this post)

Evolution (www.darwinproductions.com): I have been playing with their demo version the past 2 days and have a demo set up with them tomorrow AM. So far I like what I see with these guys. It’s an open system and except for the fact that I have to get familiar with their user interface (obviously I’m now very familiar with Netsuite so everything we look at will require some time) I like what I see. Also they have been VERY responsive to e-mails and initial questions (I have received 3 e-mail responses today—which is a Sunday)

http://www.comtechsolutions.com: I have downloaded the Vision Core demo but cannot get it to work. I’m waiting to hear back from them regarding getting the demo to work + them scheduling a sales demo for us. I’ll update this once we hear back from them.

www.corezon.com: we’re waiting to hear back from these guys also.

www.devix.com: also waiting to hear back from these guys, although their cost has us concerned

So while we are not yet sure that we are moving away from Netsuite, we are looking and will be making a decision over the next 2 weeks. I’ll post an update on our findings as we make progress.

Dom