Goldberg said much of the success of NetSuite actually belongs to Zach
Nelson, the company’s CEO and also a former Oracle VP who came onboard in
2002 and immediately, along with Ellison, began rebuilding the company’s
identity.
And now that IT budgets are loosening, Goldberg sees a bright future for
what was once known as the ASP industry. But, today, while the whole idea of
hosted software delivered remotely is the vision of Ellison and many others,
it will be the specialty ISVs that take fullest advantage of the “on-demand”
model, predicts Goldberg.
“It’s more difficult for an (ISV) with a legacy of client/server delivery to
move to this approach,” said Goldberg. “The desktop-delivered applications
will be limited to the ones that need the horsepower and graphical
capabilities of a Windows desktop application. So things like CAD, it will
be a long time before those types of applications are Web-delivered. But a
typical application that has a standard interface of forms. Those
applications are really going to be rapidly moving to the Web-based
approach.”
The next step for the company is to become consistently cash-flow positive.
Right now, some months are and some months aren’t. But, if Goldberg and
Ellison are right and software ultimately becomes a deliverable instead of a
package buy, it could be sooner rather than later. But there is a long road
between here and there. Even Goldberg admits legacy apps have a funny way of
sticking around.
“Definitely, it’s a line-of-business sale,” said Goldberg. “But we see the
CIOs and the heads of IT being on our side and being advocates for us within
the company. If I would say what the biggest barrier we see in companies is,
generally they have an entrenched application already for doing their
finance.”