NetSuite the company, NetSuite the product
NetSuite is both a company and a product. The company was founded as NetLedger in 1998 by ex-Oracle employees, with the dream that someday, a complete ERP system running in the cloud would be a good fit for many small and mid-sized companies. Only larger enterprises were offered a single application offering – everything a company would need to run their business. Smaller companies had to piece together applications such as accounting, warehouse operations, and billing themselves, with the help of system integrators. The accounting software of the day was either like QuickBooks, which ran on a personal computer with a local database, or a much more complicated server application with a relational database, which required a team of IT specialists to set it up and maintain. When companies outgrew QuickBooks, they had to move up to the larger, on-premises-installed applications. The market was not geared to mid-sized companies at that time, though options from Microsoft and others did fit the bill for some of the main ERP functions.
NetSuite's founders' vision was to build a web-based application to replace those on-premises applications and, in the process, relieve their customers of all the IT headaches that come with running servers as well as installing, maintaining, and integrating many complex business applications. And so, NetSuite was born!
NetSuite initially offered the simplest options for basic company accounting and customer record management, under the name NetLedger.com. It has, however, grown over the years to truly be a massive suite full of useful options for nearly every type of business and non-profit organization. In 2017, Oracle acquired NetSuite and the product has continued to grow and cover more ground since then.
Since NetSuite is cloud-based, you can access it from almost any internet-connected device with a web browser. With your PC or tablet (or maybe even your phone), you can log in and do whatever you need in your NetSuite account to run your business. NetSuite maintains many separate data centers around the world, thanks to Oracle's expertise and reach in this industry. Whether your employees are all in one city, or your people are spread across continents, they can easily share one common interface, any day of the week. NetSuite's multi-tenant approach to cloud computing means that you never have to worry about which server your account is running on; you trust that NetSuite is making sure that account will always be online, 24 hours a day, every day.
