NetSuite Inc., the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, announced the acquisition of London-based Venda, a leading provider of ecommerce solutions for an undisclosed amount.
NetSuite's acquisition of Venda, one of the world's leading pioneers in and providers of cloud-based digital commerce solutions, builds on the momentum of NetSuite SuiteCommerce globally and supports NetSuite's business expansion into the European market. Venda's platform serves some of the world's leading brands including Tesco F&F Clothing, boohoo.com, Laura Ashley, Little Tikes, TK Maxx and Arsenal Football Club. The combination of NetSuite and Venda will deliver unprecedented capabilities that businesses need to meet the demands to deliver a seamless, omnichannel commerce experience to consumers and businesses.
"Venda pioneered the concept of bringing commerce to the cloud and their expertise in supporting the needs of companies throughout Europe is a perfect match for NetSuite as our customers begin to adopt our SuiteCommerce omnichannel platform around the globe," said Zach Nelson, NetSuite CEO. "By combining Venda's deep customer insight and years of experience delivering a real-time, scalable commerce platform with NetSuite's cloud leadership, we can bring new capabilities to B2B and B2C companies of all sizes and transform how they run their businesses."
Venda's Convergent Commerce Platform is a comprehensive ecommerce platform enabling retailers and brands to deliver a unified experience for their customers across online, mobile, social and in-store. The company's complete ecommerce software solution combines flexibility, reliability and scalability with the operating advantages of an outsourced service. Multi-lingual and multi-currency capable, Venda's B2B and B2C solutions provide "best of the web" capabilities to Fortune 1000 companies. Venda allows customers to reduce the risk, complexity and cost associated with ecommerce, while empowering business users and delivering unprecedented ROI. Venda has offices in New York, London and Bangkok and has a customer install base focusing on the retail vertical.
"Venda has incredible technology, employees and customers. Combining those attributes with NetSuite's scale and leadership in cloud ERP and CRM technology, we are well positioned to meet the needs of our customers and execute on our vision of global commerce," said Eric Abensur, CEO of Venda.
The Shift of Business Systems to the Cloud and Omnichannel Commerce
NetSuite's acquisition of Venda increases the significant investment NetSuite has already made in two major growth engines for the company: a solution that enables companies across industries to re-platform core operational business systems in the cloud and the transformation of those core operational business systems to help organisations transform B2B and B2C commerce to support an omnichannel world.
Core business systems move to the cloud: As the Internet has required all companies to put the cloud at the centre of their business strategy, businesses are now re-platforming systems from last generation client-server software delivered by companies like Sage and Microsoft to next-generation platforms born on the cloud like NetSuite. This trend has helped NetSuite grow its market share by 33 percent across EMEA in 2013, according to research calculations based on the Gartner report, "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2013," published on March 28, 2014. The combination of Venda and NetSuite provides additional investment by NetSuite in Europe to support this transition to the cloud by companies in EMEA.
Omnichannel commerce: NetSuite SuiteCommerce, which brings together both point of sale (POS) and ecommerce on a single platform, is the only unified cloud-based omnichannel commerce solution globally that enables B2C and B2B merchants, manufacturers and distributors to seamlessly connect every step of a multi-channel, multi-location business—from ecommerce, POS and order management to merchandising, marketing, inventory, financials and customer support. The combination of NetSuite and Venda brings incremental resources, expertise and solutions to accelerate the capabilities of both B2C and B2B businesses as they re-platform for an omnichannel world.
According to the recent Forrester Research report, "European Online Retail Forecast: 2013 To 2018," published on May 29, 2014, online retail sales in Europe will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12 percent over the next five years to reach €233.9 billion by 2018 and will continue to outpace offline sales growth. As wallet share gradually shifts toward the Web, online sales are becoming a critical part of the retail economy of many European countries. With this growth in ecommerce, companies need to expand across international borders, open new subsidiaries and serve customers from all over the world. Businesses in Europe can benefit from the combination of both NetSuite SuiteCommerce and Venda's solutions to grow their business.
Today, more than 20,000 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 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 by arecent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing top 10 financial management systems vendor in the world. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financial suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud accelerates