As you now may know NetSuite has purchased Retail Anywhere to extend their reach in the SMB Retail market.   The acquisition of Retail Anywhere accelerates NetSuite’s retail roadmap for their ERP software.  They are capitalizing on Retail Anywhere staff, development and leadership as key executives will be moved to manage the NetSuite Retail business and realize knowledge gained from their previous retail experience.  NetSuite saw SMB retail customers as one of their fastest growing verticals. The range of customers targeted by NetSuite Retail are businesses with retail outlets from 5-500 outlets.

These stores capitalize on cross-channel selling opportunities and ecommerce and are looking to simplify the inventory visibility issue.  NetSuite Retail addresses the inventory issue that customers are now demanding by showing consolidated counts and views. This may include online purchasing with store pickup, current inventory levels, real-time inventory for a specific location and POS inventory visibility can all be displayed to customers which they now demand.

Retail Anywhere was essentially retail built on the NetSuite platform.  This simplified integrations and reduced multiple systems of records for SMB’s.  The complexities reduced implementation, integration and operational issues of several different retail systems. This acquisition allows NetSuite to easily use its SuiteCloud architecture to scale and adds retail functionality to it enterprise suite easily.  This acquisition adds much needed Retail functionality to a suite that was light in retail functionality very quickly. This makes it a good fit for their target SMB.  Being cloud, NetSuite will have a key advantage over other Retail ERP vendors that may be less familiar in this space.  There are many small ERP Retail vendors for both cloud and on-premise that customers in this space are unaware of and NetSuite can easily capitalize on its name recognition here.  NetSuite has leaped into conversations for companies requiring ERP Retail with legitimate functionality that it did not have previously.   

The acquisition allows NetSuite to grow quickly and scale properly. The range of customers is a targeted to strategically fit the software.  Apparel, seasonal and RFID are offered by other NetSuite partners that can round out the Retail offering from NetSuite. As its customer base gets more sophisticated with retailers with larger amounts of outlets it will be a matter of time before they acquire detailed planning and other deep supply chain functionality.  The roadmap seems to be as customers that have many outlets may dictate what functionality NetSuite will need to create or buy to satisfy the larger segment of the 5-500 store outlet customers.  NetSuite Retail mitigates many business issues that these organizations face by providing a single system of record and easily fits into a two-tier ERP strategy.   Overall, this is a smart move for NetSuite to propel them into competing with other well-known Retail ERP’s.