My thoughts on the NetSuite ad

This is a hilarious parody ad by NetSuite. I am referring to the previous posting. Kudos to their marketing/advertising partner for delivering a very entertaining piece and missing the whole point at the same time. It’s a very innovative copy (no oxymoron intended) of the Apple vs PC ads.

Now, beyond it’s laugh factor, I am not sure what else to make of it. The whole argument from the NetSuite guy goes something like cloud, cloud, cloud and more cloud. Cloud by itself has no intrinsic value to the customer. Please allow me to explain. The “cloud” no doubt allows for a lot of wonderful things that the customers would ultimately benefit from, these are already well known. Some examples are the on demand model with no set up investments, pay for usage, no upfront costs, no maintenance/upgrade headaches, potentially unlimited expansion etc. But all of the aforementioned benefits need to enable the business solutions, inorder for the customer to see any benefits from the cloud. The cloud is a means to an end and not the goal itself (unless you are the Amazon or the Google cloud). As a consumer of the ad I don’t get any info on how their magical cloud by itself will  help solve business problems.

It kind of reminded me of another statement I had heard about 8/10 years back or so at a javaone conference in San Francisco “EJB is going to kill SAP” (I am paraphrasing). The premise of that argument was that the EJB with all of its technical advantages would compete with SAP and ultimately lead to its demise. That hasn’t exactly panned out (and that was not the intended goal of the old java owners, although I am not so sure of the new ones). Technology by itself does not help the customers. Customers are helped by the solutions that the technology enables. And those solutions (that are brought about by the cloud) are not discussed at all.

Another interesting twist is that SAP has stated firm support for the cloud, unlike Larry Ellison’s stand on NetSuite’s water vapor. If anything, it should have been a Oracle guy in place of the SAP guy. Ofcourse, this decision to mock SAP instead of Oracle had nothing to do with Larry owning 51% of NetSuite .

They even choose and interesting original to “innovate” upon, Apple vs Microsoft ads. They probably don’t realize that both of these industry giants use SAP to run their businesses.

I guess the part that I had the most issues with were the portrayal of the SAP guy. It’s a German accent all right but that’s not at all how Germans behave. I should know, I have interacted closely with Germans for over a decade.

So NetSuite, I am looking forward to more ads from you which showcase what you really have to offer, in terms of solutions, instead of an endless harp of the cloud mantra.

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