Big Applications For Small Users

We noted with interest that Oracle’s SMB play into the web-based financial services market, formerly called NetLedger, now dubbed the Oracle Small Business Suite, is gaining traction.

Today, the product is used by 5,000 companies and about 20,000 users, with the average new customer having more seats (some of the original NetLedger customers bought only one or two seats).  Evan Goldberg, CEO of NetLedger, Inc., which powers the software, notes that the average customer has about five users and is growing from there, with about half the users buying the full service (at $50 per seat per month) and half the casual user service (at $10 per seat per month).

Oracle has now added an Executive Dashboard to sweeten the Suite offering, allowing any user to see all of his Oracle Small Business Suite information as a series of graphics (Snapshots), event notifications (Alerts), and reports.  Think of it as an instant, real-time Decision Support System.

	Users can see things like sales forecasts, opportunities in the sales pipeline, leads, best selling products, and so forth, by actual numbers of by exception reporting, against pre-set delimiters.
	Defaults are set by Roles, but they can be custom configured for content, for appearance, or for their position on the Dashboard.
	Results from the Dashboard can be emailed up to three times a day (for a user who’s not good about checking into the system).
	Users who want the more detailed information behind the Dashboard can drill down for that detailed data and full reports.

The best part of the new Executive Dashboard is that it’s free – anyone who’s using Oracle’s Small Business Suite can use it via the Dashboard, with just the information they have access to, based on their role and permissions, appearing.

It lets even quite small companies have both the financial management tools – and the decision making tools –that are normally only available to big companies with a skilled IT staff.  It also makes those tools – and their support -- available at a reasonable price.  That, of course, is the whole point of the on-line service (what we used to call the ASP) model.  Customers are starting to “get it” and with good reason – it gives them the function they need without the investment they’re not prepared to pay for.

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