Cox says he’s open to the possibility of using more SaaS-based tools in the future.

Suite Success

As SaaS steadily builds a real-world track record, more midsize enterprises entrust the technology with not one but multiple core business tasks. Olympus NDT, a manufacturer of testing equipment, uses NetSuite, a fully integrated suite of services, for accounting, CRM and e-commerce. Data integration was NetSuite’s biggest drawing card, says Fabrice Cancre, Olympus NDT’s chief operating officer, who oversees the enterprise’s IT operations.“The sales reps, the accountants, the inside salespeople taking the orders, the customer services reps—everybody is entering data into the same database,” he says.

While every ERP package offers data integration, SaaS gave Olympus NDT the ability to obtain ERP benefits without the complex hardware and maintenance infrastructure that usually accompanies on-premises ERP packages. “The entire system is managed by NetSuite,” Cancre says. “We don’t have any need for (ERP) servers, backup systems and the other things that add up to a very big cost for a midsized business.”

Scalability also attracted Olympus NDT to SaaS. The rapidly growing company is expanding both domestically and internationally. “We have six locations in the U.S., and we’re also using the system in Germany, France, England and Japan,” Cancre says. Adding users in new locations requires little more than logging them in to the Web-based system.

While Olympus NDT has handed over all of its customer-facing interactions to NetSuite, it still relies on traditional software, Infor Visual Manufacturing, to support another core business process, production operations. The onsite software tracks parts, coordinates ships and handles various other manufacturing-oriented tasks. “NetSuite is definitely not able to do that,” Cancre says.

On the other hand, NetSuite does exchange key business data with the manufacturing ERP software. “We’ve set up our systems so that we consider our factories as a vendor, at least from the NetSuite point of view,” Cancre says. “NetSuite then trades with the ‘customer.’”

Cancre says midsize enterprises need to view software in the same light as other essential business services. “I mean, we could have our own lawyers too,” he notes. “But we don’t have them—we hire them as we need them.”