Coming only five months after its acquisition by Oracle, NetSuite’s SuiteWorld 2017 event was always going to be a different affair from previous years. For one thing, Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd was in attendance for the first time, joining NetSuite EVP and former president Jim McGeever. The event, running from April 24-27, also shifted locales from its usual San Jose location to Las Vegas.

But both Oracle and NetSuite took pains to underscore continuity following the merger, rather than highlight any changes. McGeever emphasized that all sales, services, customer support, and development will be maintained within the NetSuite business unit, meaning that customers should expect to see minimal changes.

Double the Data Centers

On the other hand, NetSuite and Oracle leadership talked about the benefits customers will see as a result of the sale, such as greater investment in international expansion and less pressure from public shareholders.

Hurd (pictured above) also addressed the question of whether Oracle has plans to sell off any parts of the newly acquired business. To the contrary, the company announced plans for a major global expansion that will include more data centers, field offices, development centers, international product functionality, and a broader partner network.

"Leveraging Oracle's global scale, we are able to massively accelerate NetSuite's vision of bringing a single unified suite to companies all over the world," McGeever said in a statement. "Oracle's technology infrastructure and global reach enables us to help ensure customer success no matter where they are located in the world."

Under Oracle, NetSuite plans to more than double the number of data centers it operates globally, from five to eleven. The new data centers will be located in Chicago, Frankfurt, Australia, Singapore, Japan, and China. The company said the addition of the new data centers will provide customers with greater security, redundancy, performance, and scalability.

New Products

The business unit will also be expanding its field offices from 10 countries to 23, with plans to increase headcount by 50 percent to better address rising global demand for cloud enterprise resource planning services.

One new cloud service NetSuite will be offering is a core human resources service called SuitePeople, which the company is adding to its cloud suite. SuitePeople will offer core HR capabilities, HR analytics, compliance, and security services, according to the NetSuite.

The company is also reconfiguring the way it delivers its cloud solutions. NetSuite is calling the new platform SuiteSuccess, and marketing it as a unified industry cloud solution to address the unique needs of a number of sectors, including advertising, media and publishing, financial technology, manufacturing, retail, software and Internet, and wholesale distribution businesses.

Meanwhile, NetSuite also took advantage of this week’s event to launch of several new artificial intelligence apps for the customer experience. The new services, known collectively as Adaptive Intelligence Apps, analyze large data sets, such as customer behavior, in real time.