I just read a post titled “NetSuite parts ways with largest reseller” in Phil Wainewright’s SaaS blog on ZDNet.  Our sad story was mentioned in the post as a possible reason for the split.  Hard to say, I don’t think NetSuite loses any sleep over how customers are treated.  If I had to guess and knowing what I know about the owner of Skyytek I would agree with Phil in that it is more about NetSuite directly competing with their partners with their newly minted “SuiteSucess” consulting division.

I remember I was at the first or second NetSuite partner conference at Redwood Shores sometime around 2005, before the Zach Nelson era. (correction, I think this was around 2003/2004 and Zach Nelson was the CEO at the time) The founder, Evan Goldberg was the CxO at the time (I can’t remember his exact title).  In any case he addressed the crowd on the opening day with a sweet story of how he asked his daughter what he should say and she said tell them you love them.  Evan’s next words were “I love you”.  I thought that was a great, heartfelt, Steve Jobisian way of starting the partner conference.  I think he was wearing a black turtleneck as well.

Apparently the partner love is gone and NetSuite’s customer service policies and attitude will now extend to the channel.  I feel sorry for any partners who have put a lot of time, money and energy into the NetSuite channel  because your best friend is now your worst nightmare.  I wish them (NS partners) well in their future endeavors.

The last thing I have to say about NetSuite is that they still do not have any out of the box functionality to get your data out of the their system in any sort of relational format.  You can read more about that topic in the Who Owns YOUR Data series.  The real problem with this is that this type of restrictive policy is bad for the entire SaaS industry.

According to the MSDN article Multi Tennant Data Architecture “Trust, or the lack thereof, is the number one factor blocking the adoption of software as a service (SaaS).”  If this is true then it would be to NetSuite’s advantage to make sure there is at least some illusion of trust.  I hope someone with more clout than me can get them to change this policy before it infects the rest of the SaaS ecosystem.

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