Credit: Dreamstime
Onlineone has acquired the NetSuite customer accounts of Akuna Solutions, building on 20 years of market expertise and specialised capabilities across Australia.
The move is designed to expand NetSuite reach across the mid-market through business and technical consulting services, scaling alongside increased customer demand for cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.
“Our aim is to provide companies who use NetSuite with the best possible resources so they get the best business outcomes and success from their investment,” said Don McLean, CEO of Onlineone. “Our only focus is NetSuite and we grow through these types of acquisitions.
“We've been doing this for almost 20 years now and want to put a program in place that brings customer success through proven and tested methods. If we have more customers, more will benefit and we can grow and scale our business as we do, expanding profits along the way.”
Meanwhile, the acquisition will allow Akuna Solutions to refocus efforts on building out Sage expertise in a “best of both worlds” transaction.
“We get to focus on our strengths in the Sage environment but without letting our NetSuite customers down,” noted Mike Lorge, CEO of Akuna Solutions. “We believe our NetSuite customers will have the best experience from the team at Onlineone. They’ve been involved with NetSuite for over 20 years which brings a vast level of expertise from which our customers will benefit.”
Launched in 2007 by McLean and Craig Traub as co-founders, Onlineone started out delivering technical and consulting services specific to NetSuite, supported by the creation of unique IP across Australia and New Zealand markets.
The business was subsequently sold to Fronde in 2013 during which time the technology provider was named NetSuite Partner of the Year in Asia Pacific twice, as Oracle snapped up the vendor in a US$9.3 billion deal first revealed to the market in 2016.
Fast forward to 2020 and the NetSuite assets of Fronde were acquired by McLean and Traub in a management buy-out, bringing Onlineone back to life in the process.
“We’ve been addressing the NetSuite market space since 2003,” stated McLean, in reference to his previous role as sales director of Net Return, a specialist launch distributor of NetSuite in Australia.
Looking ahead, McLean observed “pent up demand” as Australia exits lockdowns with NetSuite opportunities emerging in FinTech and via mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity.
“In the 20 years we’ve been addressing cloud-based ERP the overall demand has grown in line with cloud growth in general,” McLean added. “As NetSuite's feature functionality has increased, customers are looking for partners that have industry experience and can address specific requirements.”
In assessing the evolution of the ERP market in Australia, McLean acknowledged that while customers are more educated in terms of product requirements and buying research, never before has the marketplace been so “confusing”.
“Customers are more reliant on getting the right adviser who can help,” he explained. “Our job is to assess in the buying journey and help customers see the power of NetSuite in relation to their business.
“The popularity of products such as Xero -- which most start-ups use -- has also led to an increase in expectations. Most of our new customers are upgraded from Xero with functions like bank feeds from the major Australian banks now viewed as standard, which NetSuite implemented earlier this year.”
In response, McLean said specialist partners must now work to address more end-user demands than before, due largely in part to the enhanced features and functions of tools such as NetSuite.
“As the NetSuite feature functionality increases you either focus on just NetSuite or you don't service your customer properly,” he said. “What we see in the future is more consolidation as the larger partners gain more market share with smaller partners either operating within a particular niche area or exiting the ecosystem.”
