Netsuite today announced the agreement to acquire SaaS professional services automation (PSA) vendor QuickArrow for $20M. Todays announcement comes a little over a year after Netsuite acquired SaaS PSA vendor OpenAir. Prior to that acquisition Netsuite had released a vertical solution aimed at the under-served project-based business market. Last Fall Netsuite took that vertical offering deeper with the integration of OpenAir and announced a full SaaS services resource planning (SRP) solution, the first end-to-end SaaS SRP offering on the market. I wrote a post on that announcement here so I won't rehash all of that now. With the acquisition of QuickArrow Netsuite gains additional customers and additional IP that can be leveraged into the main product offering over time. In the more limited PSA market the combined QuickArrow / OpenAir customer share would make them one of the market leaders with over 80K subscribers. The current plan is to leave QuickArrow as a stand-alone product but customers will have the option of migrating to the deeper functionality of the combined Netsuite / OpenAir SRP suite. Netsuite's SRP strategy continues to be:
-move up market with larger enterprise project based businesses
-expand its international SRP footprint
-offer deep vertical functionality with the combined Netsuite / OpenAir suite
The SRP market, even in these tough economic times, has held up as a bright spot in the overall Applications Market.
