Evan Goldberg – founder and executive vice-president of Oracle NetSuite – visited Sydney in April 2023 for NetSuite’s annual user event SuiteConnect to meet customers and launch new updates to the cloud business management suite NetSuite provides.

Acuity editor Abigail Murison chatted to him about his career, the role of enterprise resource planning (ERP) for businesses and how accounting underpins business success.

Q Have you always been interested in tech?

A Yes. My dad was an engineer and worked on radar systems. He worked with big computers; personal computers weren’t introduced until he was nearing retirement. However, it was the personal computers that really attracted me to the tech industry. Apple and the Apple II and then the Apple Mac – that ability to have all that power right at your fingertips was what interested me.

Moving to the West Coast was somewhat my sister’s idea. She wasn’t in tech, she was in finance, but she knew about Oracle and she said, ‘This company Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison – he’s going to lead this great new wave of software companies on the West Coast’.

I was just coming out of college in Boston [on the East Coast] and I didn’t know anything about the industry. So, I took her word for it and went to work on the West Coast. I’ve been there ever since.

Q And you got your start through Larry Ellison?

A He actually interviewed me and I developed a friendship with him while working at Oracle. I left to start a company that didn’t work out, but he helped me.

And then, when I came up with my next idea, we had a meeting of the minds about what that would be, and long story short it turned into NetLedger, now NetSuite.

Q That failed company was mBED Software?

A Yes. But by starting that company [in 1995] I learned a lot about running a business and being an entrepreneur.

I realised that there weren’t great tools for entrepreneurs to run a business. That’s what made me want to start NetLedger originally.

Pictured: Evan Goldberg

“I learned a lot about running a business and being an entrepreneur. I realised there weren’t great tools for entrepreneurs to run a business.”

Q That’s right: NetLedger was primarily an accounting tool.

A We started with accounting, but we knew all along that we wanted to build an entire suite. It was really Larry’s vision to start with accounting because that is core to your business – it’s your sales, products, expenses and people – and then branch out into other areas using financials as the base.

Today, we have a more complex suite of offerings like we envisioned. But, when our customers adopt NetSuite, they often start with financials and then they branch out to inventory management, CRM [customer relationship management], HR [human resources] and so on as they grow.

Q In Australia and New Zealand, two of the more small- and medium-sized enterprise-focused competitors are Xero and MYOB. Do you see businesses moving naturally from those solutions to ERP?

A Yes. As businesses grow and become more complex, they need to be able to control their operations remotely. That’s especially true now, with companies having the ability to sell anything online anywhere in the world and expanding overseas extremely quickly as a result. People are doing that earlier and earlier in the company’s lifecycle, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. That’s when they say, ‘I need NetSuite’.

As you grow, you don’t just have a few people in one office who can shout over the cubicle wall and ask what’s going on. With a cloud-based solution like NetSuite, you have the visibility and control across all areas and functions of the business from anywhere and at any time, helping to spotlight any inefficiencies, as well as opportunities for growth.

Q The ERP market is very competitive and different vendors have sprung up to cater to ‘entry level’ businesses, versus large corporations. What’s the sweet spot for businesses that are going to use NetSuite as their ERP solution?

A We run on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in Sydney, on its flagship hardware, so we can scale to very large companies. We combine our deep understanding of growing businesses and our scalable system to serve any sized business – from a smaller family-owned business to enterprises with tens of thousands of employees. For many companies, it’s the last business system upgrade you’ll ever have to do.

Q When a company comes into NetSuite now, is the person that’s driving that change an accountant or is it the business owner?

A It depends on the size of the business. Entrepreneurs or business owners usually have the vision that they might start with accounting, but that they eventually need to tie everything together – from inventory to sales to financials.

Often, there are two types of pain that cause people to choose NetSuite. One is they outgrow their small business accounting system that they started with. That move might be driven by an accountant or a CFO [chief financial officer] and they start the conversation to look for an alternative.

Once the entrepreneur gets involved, they see the second type of pain: they’re starting to think about how they haven’t been able to get insights from their data to act on. They want to know how they can get great information about the entire business, not just the income statement and the balance sheet. That’s really why we built NetSuite, so that the entrepreneur and everybody else running the business has a dashboard with up-to-the-minute information about what’s happening across all operations. The unified insights NetSuite provides allows you to have visibility into every area of your business, identify the trends and make better decisions.

Q What software functions are growing in popularity in the current global environment?

A We announced a number of new capabilities specifically for finance departments [in April 2023]. NetSuite allows you to focus on and rely on the certainty of your numbers, which is the best thing you can do in uncertain times to help your bottom line. The announcements we made support that.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is crucial because it helps automate labour-intensive planning and budgeting processes so finance teams can keep pace with their changing environments and quickly produce budgets, forecasts and what-if scenarios. Some people went from yearly planning to quarterly planning, and now they’re doing continuous planning.

We also announced Cash 360, which is a customisable dashboard that helps finance departments simplify cash management and accurately forecast. People want to be able to do more with less, or more with the same, and it’s harder these days to go out and raise money. Managing your cash flow is more critical than ever.

Q Your biggest markets are the US, the UK and Australia. How is the US market different from your other markets?

A Businesses are actually more alike than they are different. When I look at a business in Australia and a business in the US, if they’re in the same industry, they’re much more alike than you’d think. Mostly what we try to do is deal with the regulatory differences. That’s why some of the software capabilities take a little longer to reach different markets because when you have ecommerce, for example, we need to make sure we have all the payment methods that are used locally and integrate with all the logistics providers. For HR, we have to make sure that we consider applicable employee regulations and that our payroll system works for Australia and New Zealand.

But the fundamental workings of the system are the same. With businesses selling in so many different overseas markets, they need to be conversant with everything. They can’t be insular. You’re competing in markets all over the world, potentially pretty early. You want to have a differentiator, but you need all of the table-stakes items that your competitors all over the world have.

I think what we’ve seen is Australian companies competing really effectively. Some great companies that have become international brands started over here.

 Pictured: Evan Goldberg visited Sydney in April 2023 to announce the launch of new Oracle NetSuite modules for Australian and New Zealand customers.

“When I look at a business in Australia and a business in the US, if they’re in the same industry they’re much more alike than you’d think.”

Q Many entrepreneurs have different types of expertise and very often it’s not in accounting. How do they get the right people in finance and other critical business areas?

A I think that, in general, good leaders have an expertise in one particular area and are good at recognising what other people’s strengths are and the traits that make people successful. Entrepreneurs need to develop great leaders in areas that they don’t know much about.

They need to take their leadership skill set and learnings from their observations of successful people and translate it to these other domains.

That’s one of the things I’ve started to do in the areas where I’m not an expert.

“Entrepreneurs need to develop great leaders in areas that they don’t know much about. They need to take their leadership skill set and learnings from their observations of successful people and translate it to these other domains.”

Q You have local servers for your customer data. Has that been a big push, in terms of data and privacy requirements?

A Well, Australia is so far from anywhere else that we established local data centres. We’re seeing increasingly that because of regulations and compliance, it’s becoming more and more important to have data in your market. But that’s one of the things we’re seeing all over the world, not just here.

Q You’re already using machine learning and AI [artificial intelligence]. But do you think we’re all going to be buying avatar clothes and working in the metaverse?

A We try to stick to more pragmatic uses of AI. When you look at your phone and it says, “You usually go to the gym about this time every day and we noticed that there’s some traffic on the way to the gym” that is a very practical use of intelligent assistance. This is what NetSuite is trying to do for people in finance departments, for example.

It’s like spotting outliers. I know accountants can spend a lot of time dealing with exceptions, so we want to automate those time-consuming processes so that when the system notices an exception, it generates an alert email. This helps accountants save time and increase the accuracy of their work, so they can spend more time on value-adding initiatives.

Q One of the next big things for accounting is sustainability reporting. What are your capabilities?

A We haven’t added built-in product features for that yet. We have partners that build solutions to integrate with NetSuite as it’s a very extensible system. I think it’s something that, moving forward, is going to be an important part of our product strategy.

Q Your career is tech based, but it’s taken you from Oracle to a web-design startup and then into business, and accounting and finance. Do you like where you have ended up?

A I was always really interested in business, so I love being able to help entrepreneurs who have that fire in their belly to succeed. That’s what it’s always been about.