SAN JOSE, California ? At the SuiteWorld 2016 conference being held here, cloud computing firm NetSuite announced its latest product called SuiteBilling, which unifies both the billing and revenue recognition processes regardless of business model.
Built natively into NetSuite?s core ERP system, the company said SuiteBilling is the industry?s first and only cloud solution that synchronizes complex processes from order to billing to revenue recognition, all within one system.
Billing is often thought of as a mundane but necessary task, treated as a standardized process created solely to collect payment on a sales order, according to NetSuite. However, as technology is becoming a component of every business process and cloud adoption continues to grow, every company is being forced to rethink its business model.
According to MGI Research, an independent research and strategic advisory firm, the cloud billing market will grow from $1.1 billion in 2016 to $5.5 billion in 2020, at an estimated compound annual growth rate of 49%.
MGI Research also estimates that companies will spend over $194 billion on billing — an aggregated number that includes labor, deployment, technology services, upgrade costs, and maintenance.
?Monetization ? which is how efficiently and effectively demand is created and translated into revenue, profit and market differentiation ? is essential to today?s growth initiatives like IoT, digital business, and omnichannel. The concept of an Agile Monetization Platform, which brings together nine functions such as financials, order management, billing, revenue recognition and commerce, is gaining traction among progressive companies. With SuiteBilling, NetSuite is adding one of the key elements of AMP,? said Igor Stenmark, managing director at MGI Research.
In recent years, NetSuite also said dramatic shifts in the marketplace like the Internet of Things (IoT), the emergence of services attached to products and trends towards subscription-based pricing, have transformed the importance of the billing process.
Additionally, NetSuite?s cloud-based architecture, with the SuiteCloud development platform, enables customizations that carry forward automatically with every upgrade.
?As the cloud pioneer, with more than 30,000 customers spread across diverse industries and innovative business models, NetSuite has a front-row seat to the impact of digital disruption on billing and revenue recognition,? said NetSuite president and chief operating officer Jim McGeever.