“For businesses in Europe, cost savings are not the main driver for moving to cloud business applications. Our research shows that they increasingly see cloud as a solution to the challenges of industry transformation, competition and as a means to facilitate global expansion,” said Alexander Michael, Director of Consulting at Frost & Sullivan. “With so many citing cloud applications as an advantage, it’s clear that organisations that have not yet made the move are losing out.” Other key findings based on the research include:
- European companies are branching out from traditional cloud applications like productivity, CRM and collaboration and into financial processes.
- In the UK alone, the proportion of organisations that deploy a main business management application in the cloud has increased from 40 percent in 2014 to 62 percent in 2016.
- Cloud applications are also driving bottom-line benefits.
- Even as businesses are turning to cloud applications, many are still confronting the traditional challenges they found with on-premise systems in integrating disparate applications. Among respondents, 65 percent report front and back office integration challenges.
“This research confirms what we’ve been seeing across our customer base in Europe for the last several years,” said Mark Woodhams, SVP & Managing Director of NetSuite EMEA. “Businesses are turning to the cloud for its agility, scalability and flexibility, and reaping the rewards by delivering innovative product and services that are transforming industries. A unified suite of applications running off of a single database, like NetSuite, answers these challenges. A solution built for the cloud, NetSuite spans back office financials, inventory and order management, CRM, ecommerce and warehouse management with a powerful and flexible development platform that easily enables companies to customise NetSuite to meet their business requirements and to integrate with other third-party systems.”
A Foundation for Global Growth
Frost & Sullivan’s research also found that of all the IT decision makers who have concerns about IT issues with extending global operations, an astounding 75 percent believe that cloud would help them address their issues. And, of the executives worried about accounting issues with globalisation, 58 percent would look to cloud for a solution.
“NetSuite can quickly and easily adapt to local and regional taxation changes as it did by automatically accommodating the change to the EU Value Added Tax (VAT) in 2014. In light of Brexit, there may be changes in business regulation and taxation. NetSuite will make our customers compliant without disruption,” said Craig Sullivan, SVP, Enterprise and International Products at NetSuite. “Additionally, NetSuite OneWorld provides support for 190 currencies, 20 languages, automated tax calculation and reporting in more than 100 countries, and customer transactions in more than 200 countries, giving businesses a powerful foundation to extend global operations.”
