NetSuite vs. SAP: OneWorld Beats Business ByDesign in All Categories

Last week, Strategy Partners International announced that an independent panel of judges at Sapience 2009 declared NetSuite OneWorld the winner of an “enterprise software shoot-out” against SAP Business ByDesign. Of late, NetSuite has been going after SAP pretty aggressively, so they are certainly proud to wear this feather in their cap.

The judges were enterprise gurus Ray Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, and Helmuth Gumbel, and the challenge was a real-world test of CRM, goods production and order fulfillment, and financial management. Judges were asked to judge each product across 23 different criteria in five general categories: design, usability, functional aspects, technical aspects, and other. The aforementioned processes were judged based on these scenarios: for CRM, the process from lead to opportunity to order; for production and fulfillment, from work order to purchasing to goods assembly to shipping; for financial management, from invoicing to payment to financial reporting.

Judges were permitted to weigh the importance of each category and contribute that to the final score, and the vote was unanimous. The difference between the two composite scores was not given, but it was noted that processes on SAP’s solution required more user input than those on NetSuite OneWorld. Another strike against Business ByDesign was that it couldn’t produce real-time financial reporting, as well as its inability to demonstrate multi-subsidiary consolidation.

The attributes most appreciated in NetSuite OneWorld were its customizability, breadth and depth of functionality, and the portability it allows as a SaaS platform. While NetSuite has every right to celebrate their product, it is important to remember that SAP is fairly late to the SaaS game (and NetSuite has been at it for a decade). Business ByDesign has had a rought time getting off the ground, but hopefully with coming upgrades it will be a more sophisticated ERP platform.

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