Five Questions with NetSuite's CFO

CIO - You don't often hear about high-tech vendor CFOs who go out on sales calls with the sales guys. But when you're selling and using your own Web-based accounting, ERP and e-commerce software in-house- as NetSuite does-then there's no better person to have in the room than your own CFO when a potential customer asks: How does this functionality work? Or, What about SaaS security?

That's not Jim McGeever's main job description, but it's what he occasionally does for NetSuite-as well as, of course, being in charge of the 11-year-old SaaS software vendor's finances. "I've been on three calls this week," McGeever says in late October.

CIO.com Senior Editor Thomas Wailgum spoke with McGeever about the changing nature of business applications, Larry Ellison's effect on NetSuite and how he deals with on-premise software vendor's FUD. (Here's an edited version of their conversation.)

1. So because you're a CFO, just how effective are you selling Web-based ERP software?Jim McGeever: I'm very effective when it comes to selling to software companies. I don't work the entire sales cycle, but I often do a demo early on and then maybe get involved toward end. It's very effective because when I'm having a conversation with them, they'll say: "We need to amortize our commissions over the contract period." And I say, "OK, this is how we do it at NetSuite." Or, with some cases, I'll tell them: "We used to do it this way, and stopped and tried it this way. Now we do it this way." With a software company, that's incredibly effective because you build the credibility that you understand their problems and you understand how to fix them.

2. Is the notion of what constitutes a "business application" changing among your customers?McGeever: It used to be that every [department] had a separate application, and those workers sat at their desks and used them all day. And then BI tools were layered across all of these applications to give information to people who didn't sit at their desks all day long using an app. They were the "users" of all this data that would come. Someone would have to consolidate that data, and a whole new industry came out of that. With the new generation of apps, where NetSuite is a good example of that, we combine all of that together. And everything is in real time. In the old world, you had the "closing process," [which could take weeks]. Now, it's about what's going on today. I don't look at my cash-collected numbers for last month. I look at what they were yesterday or this morning.