Oracle NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) transforms how businesses analyse, understand, and report on their operations by delivering deep insights into NetSuite’s rich operational and transactional data.
These functionalities are powered by Oracle, which seamlessly connects NetSuite with its advanced enterprise performance management capabilities. This integration allows businesses to harness the full power of Oracle’s EPM tools, enabling more sophisticated planning, budgeting, and forecasting while maintaining the agility and ease of use that NetSuite is known for.
How EPM aligns strategic goals with daily operations
EPM ensures that a business’s strategic goals and daily operations remain in sync by tracking progress and enabling timely course corrections. It also identifies emerging trends and automates key financial processes like budgeting, account reconciliation, and closing the books. By streamlining these tasks, EPM empowers finance teams, CFOs, and managers to work more efficiently and make better-informed decisions.
Understanding the unique value that EPM brings to NetSuite’s broad customer base requires a brief dive into the histories of Oracle and NetSuite, and also Oracle’s strategic vision that has driven this development over the years.
The Oracle acquisition of NetSuite
Founded in 1998, NetSuite is a pioneer in cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, offering a suite of services that included financial management, customer relationship management (CRM), eCommerce, and professional services automation. Its primary focus has been on small to midsized businesses (SMEs), a niche that it successfully dominates.
In 2016, Oracle acquired NetSuite for approximately $9.3 billion. This strategic acquisition allowed Oracle to broaden its cloud offerings and strengthen its position in the cloud ERP market, particularly among SMEs. Despite the acquisition, Oracle maintained NetSuite as an independent global business unit, allowing NetSuite to stay true to its focus on mid-sized organisations while benefiting from Oracle’s extensive resources and global infrastructure.
Oracle didn’t stop there. It invested heavily in enhancing NetSuite’s capabilities, leveraging its vast global scale and resources to expand NetSuite’s global data centres, field offices and development centres. Oracle has also been busy integrating additional functionalities, such as generative AI capabilities, to meet the increasingly digital needs of its customer base.
The evolution of Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM
Parallel to NetSuite’s growth, Oracle was advancing its Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution as part of its broader Fusion Applications initiative, which began in the mid-2000s. The initiative aimed to unify and modernise Oracle’s diverse portfolio of acquired technologies and applications. Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM was initially developed to meet the needs of larger enterprises with complex financial and operational requirements, offering comprehensive solutions for planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, close processes, and reporting.
As Oracle’s cloud strategy evolved, so did its infrastructure, with the continuous development of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OCI provides a high-performance, secure, and scalable platform that underpins Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM, making it more flexible and capable of incorporating cutting-edge technologies—like AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics—and able to manage complex financial processes and large-scale data analysis.
The synergy between NetSuite and Oracle Cloud EPM
NetSuite is well-known for its ERP solutions tailored to SMEs, while Oracle Cloud EPM brings advanced performance management into the mix. Oracle’s smart move was developing pre-built integrations that seamlessly connect the two, enabling NetSuite customers to access sophisticated planning, budgeting, and forecasting tools.
Perhaps most importantly, this integration allows NetSuite customers to scale their performance management processes without the need to overhaul their existing ERP systems.
The strategic advantage for NetSuite customers
Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite and its integration with Oracle Cloud EPM offer customers a unified view of organisational performance, enabling more strategic and informed decision-making.
Oracle’s strategy has always been to offer flexible and scalable solutions that cater to a wide range of business sizes and industries. By enabling integration between NetSuite and Oracle Cloud EPM, Oracle provides a pathway for organisations to evolve and expand their financial management capabilities as their business grows and their needs become more complex.
