NetSuite Guides Lonely Planet To The Cloud

SYDNEY, Oct. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that Lonely Planet, the world's largest travel guidebook publisher, has selected NetSuite OneWorld to replace SAP R/3 4.7 and Salesforce.com as its business management software globally, as part of a broader IT strategy to move to the cloud to achieve a more flexible and nimble IT operation. Lonely Planet plans to deploy NetSuite OneWorld to better manage its core business processes, including financials, customer relationship management (CRM), demand planning, project management, warehousing and manufacturing. NetSuite OneWorld also provides multi-subsidiary, multi-language and multi-currency support that will allow Lonely Planet to manage its operations in real time by consolidating financials for five to ten different currencies, automating reporting and performing cost of sales analytics in Australia, the US, UK, India, China and new markets it enters.

Established in Melbourne more than 40 years ago, Lonely Planet is one of the world's most successful travel publishers, with 350 employees, 200 authors and more than 120 million books printed in 11 different languages. It is the number one travel guide book brand in the US, Australia and the UK, with more than 150 million unique users visiting its website every year and more than 11 million apps downloaded. Like the rest of the publishing industry, information consumption has changed considerably in the past decade, which has forced Lonely Planet to change its business model to remain relevant, as the traditional book industry declines. Despite these challenges, Lonely Planet has and will continue to evolve and help shape the future of travel.

"The reality of fast-changing market conditions means we need to stay ahead to generate future revenue and remain relevant," said Gus Balbontin, CTO of Lonely Planet. "This is the main driver for moving our entire IT strategy to the cloud, so we can gain greater flexibility to move quickly with the market as it changes, and to expand our footprint globally. With our business model changing in such a big way, we can't rely on a heavily customised and costly ERP solution to give us the agility we need. This is why we turned to NetSuite to give us the required flexibility, speed and agility to more easily achieve our broader growth strategy."

Lonely Planet reviewed a number of cloud solutions in the market, but found NetSuite was the only company that could provide all the ERP components it required in a single solution. NetSuite OneWorld delivers real-time global business management and financial consolidation at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premise ERP solutions. It also provides numerous benefits for global businesses like Lonely Planet, driving finance and operational efficiency, delivering real-time visibility and consolidation, and providing flexibility for customisation to corporate and subsidiary needs. The move to NetSuite OneWorld will enable Lonely Planet to align operations across finance, sales and service, while seamlessly handling complex taxation rules and reporting requirements for the five countries it has a footprint in, all from a single solution.

"NetSuite can give us control of our ERP back, rather than being part of a black box in a server room that is owned and controlled by somebody else," said Mr Balbontin. "The ability for us to manage our own reports, the flexibility of accessing data that we need and not having to worry about upgrades and maintenance costs are major bonuses that give us the ability to operate at a much lower cost than what we currently have today. The open code also makes a big difference to us in terms of being able to scale faster and be the masters of our own destiny."

Looking beyond the initial OneWorld deployment, Lonely Planet is also exploring Ecommerce opportunities with NetSuite's SuiteCommerce Platform. NetSuite OneWorld provides an integrated business management suite for Ecommerce, giving businesses like Lonely Planet the ability to efficiently manage international operations and consolidate the entire breadth of Ecommerce business activities. This includes accounting, order management, inventory, warehouse management, returns management, billing, customer support, marketing, sales force automation and customer relationship tracking and management data in a single repository, allowing all aspects of Ecommerce to be managed from within one single application.

"Lonely Planet has a big vision to expand its footprint around the world and NetSuite OneWorld can support that vision to help the company achieve international growth with much greater ease," said Mark Troselj, managing director of APAC and Japan for NetSuite. "Without being encumbered by IT infrastructure, Lonely Planet can gain the agility and flexibility to grow and explore new markets knowing it can easily switch on vital business systems already geared to work in whatever market it enters. This can give Lonely Planet more power and control over its business, as well as real-time visibility on a global scale."

Today, more than 16,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-class cloud financials/ERP suites for divisions of large enterprises and mid-sized organisations seeking to upgrade their antiquated client/server ERP systems. NetSuite excels at streamlining business operations as demonstrated in a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing financial management software vendor on a global basis. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financials suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud is accelerating.

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SOURCE NetSuite Inc.