NetSuite Analytics Warehouse
Or NSAW as the cool kids call it
Last week, NetSuite hosted a fantastic workshop on their Analytics Warehouse module (aka NSAW). It took place in Irvine, close to where I went to college, so it was a ton of fun to be back in my old stomping grounds.
In case you’re unaware of these events, NetSuite routinely hosts them across the country, in a couple formats:
Inside the Suite: geared towards an audience that is either considering NS or is a brand new user to it. Content is broad, and purposely high level. You’ll see atleast 2-3 reps in the room, and there’s a lot of time for Q&A.
Learning Lab: hands on tutorials, classroom style. Intended audience is current NS users. You’ll get access to a test instance and they’ll be an educator guiding everyone through an exercise.
Customer meetups: geared towards current users. Meant for networking and to go deep on a particular feature or module. The NSAW event I went to was of this kind.
Back to the NSAW event - it was held in the private dinner room of a restaurant. About ~30 people came, including 2-3 Oracle staff. The vast majority of attendees were users, running the entire gamut of industry including a doors company, a luxury bath brand, and a pharmaceutical startup1. Most work in finance, though I did meet some in ops and IT administration.
Jeremy Reisman led the session where he presented a deck and some video demos. Couple notes I wote down:
NSAW is a BI tool, meant to compete with PowerBI and Tableau. It ingests data from various sources (Salesforce, Shopify, ADP, etc), intelligently joins it to your NS data, and produces reports on top of everything.
There’s a couple angles they’re taking with their pitch:
It’s a pain to ask IT + analytics to join a bunch of external data together. Let NSAW do that for you
The competitors are a pain to implement, and they’re not targeted towards the finance oriented users NSAW targets
Your data is hosted on Oracle’s infra, so you get all the security that comes with that2
Potential use cases with NSAW:
Forecast cash position 3 months to 5 years into the future by combining AR, AP, and payroll data
Generate payment risk scores showing which customers are high/medium/low risk
Calculate customer churn
Three ways to integrate with NSAW:
Pre-built connectors (easiest - just login credentials needed)3
iPaaS solutions like Workato and Boomi
Export/import for historical data or systems without APIs
What about AI?
Oracle signed a deal with OpenAI to create a secure, customer-specific AI platform. I suspect they’ll tease this out more at SuiteWorld, and formally ship it next year.
There’s an AI assistant that can summarize and visualize existing data. For example, you could open a balance sheet and then ask the chatbot to visualize it & do the reverse (visualization → text summary)4
Of all the NetSuite hosted events I went to, this had the most audience energy and participation. There were a lot of questions asked by attendees.
Overall, it was a blast and I want to thank Jeremy and the rest of the Oracle staff for hosting us. I’d highly encourage readers to check out these events. It’s a great way to meet other users, and keep your NS education up to date.
See you at the next event!
Resources:
Granola notes
NSAW deck
NSAW data sheet
If you’re a NetSuite user and interested in joining our invite-only slack community, DM me on LinkedIn. We have folks from Coinbase, Miro, and Olipop already there; we’d love have you too. More info here.
It will never cease to amaze me just how diverse an audience NetSuite serves. It’s ability to serve such a wide array of industries as a one size fits all tool is pretty impressive.
This is a selling point you will hear over and over again with all of their add-ons. I suspect it lands well with CIO / IT types.
It takes 8-10 weeks for a NSAW implementation.
There’s actually some ongoing work by the legendary Tim Dietrich happening in this space. Check out his beta product, SuiteAnalyzer.