At its SuiteWorld user conference in San Jose, Calif., in early May, NetSuite launched SuiteCommerce InStore, which will build on its SuiteCommerce platform to help businesses better account for the gaps between online and offline customer experiences. The product aggregates customer records and buying history and puts them into store associates’ hands.

The company’s CEO, Zach Nelson, also discussed plans for expansion by way of partnerships. Following its recent acquisition of Bronto Software, a company that will enable NetSuite to unify marketing and commerce, the company formed an alliance with Microsoft, which will allow NetSuite to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and integrate Office 365 into its own platform. 

NetSuite also announced a relationship with American Express Global Business Travel to enable NetSuite customers to book travel through the platform, and an alliance with Qlik, a provider of business intelligence and data visualization software.

NetSuite also used the conference to outline its plans to bolster its marketing software. The company’s most significant development will be optimizing marketing functions. “We have greatly advanced marketing automation in our system, and with the acquisition of Bronto, we’re going to be able to bring marketing automation to the next level,” said NetSuite’s founder and chief technology officer, Evan Goldberg. 

The company is building up on the data front as well. Goldberg highlighted a new partnership with Dun & Bradstreet, a provider of data, insights, and analytics. 

In addition, NetSuite is releasing SuiteApp, which will run on the SuiteCloud development platform. With the app, companies will have quick access to a broad database of industry information.

Also “in the labs,” according to Goldberg, are new intelligent marketing predictive capabilities that will clue in marketers about how to better target potential customers. “We want to go beyond processing what you tell it to do; we want it to actually help you decide what to do [with] intelligent assistance, intelligent automation,” Goldberg said. “We built a data science team so that [we could develop] features that predict, optimize, recommend, and uncover valuable nonobvious insight to enable our customers to be proactively agile and disrupt [their] competitors.”  —Oren Smilansky