Navigating NetSuite Infrastructure Upgrades and Optimizing for Return on Investment

This article is relevant if you need to quickly understand NetSuite’s technology integration options and infrastructure enhancements, including a method for optimizing its application.

Background

NetSuite provides a foundational technical infrastructure tailored to general business needs through its cloud-based service. My firm, Prolecto Resources, leverages NetSuite to drive its client service and accounting operations, finding the entry-level infrastructure adequate for its transaction volume.

However, many clients require more robust NetSuite infrastructure capabilities. Following Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite, certain infrastructure standards have been mandated. For instance, organizations are compelled into Standard, Premium, Enterprise, and Ultimate Service Tiers based on monthly transaction volumes. Upgrading tiers reduces the number of shared independent organizational users on the application and database clusters and enhances concurrency capacities. A NetSuite application cluster is designed for a multi-tenant service — upgrades in the service tiers mean less of this cluster infrastructure is shared with other organizations.

While monthly transaction thresholds are mandatory for tier classification, as detailed in Oracle’s documentation, other infrastructure elements are optional and less understood, offering additional flexibility and customization options for businesses with more complex needs.

Considerations for Upgradeable NetSuite Infrastructure

For businesses that have been using NetSuite for some time and who have experienced business growth, enhancing user performance might necessitate infrastructure upgrades. The Oracle Sales Team may propose upgrades that might lead to changes in your Service Tier.  The Service Tiers, though, are a gateway to application capacity enhancements.  Understanding the following three critical aspects of application infrastructure is essential for evaluating these upgrades:

1. Integration Concurrency: This refers to how many external-to-NetSuite integrations can connect simultaneously.
2. SuiteCloud Processors: These are primarily responsible for executing background scripts.
3. Business Process Customizations: These are logic customizations that are tailored to your specific business processes within NetSuite.

Gaining a clear understanding of these components will help you determine whether an upgrade will deliver the improvements you need. While the explanations here are simplified, our Firm advises a thorough review of your application and integration architecture to ensure any infrastructure upgrade maximizes your return on investment.

Understanding NetSuite Integration Concurrency

Integration Concurrency is a key infrastructure component, especially when connecting external systems like eCommerce platforms to NetSuite. It refers to the number of simultaneous connections your infrastructure can handle. For instance, in an eCommerce context, concurrency determines how many orders can be inserted into NetSuite simultaneously. Analogous to highway lanes, more concurrency allows for higher data traffic volumes.

When setting up external-facing services for integration, consider these NetSuite interfaces:

1. REST Web Services: NetSuite’s latest offering for integration. See NetSuite REST Web Services Documentation for more information.
2. Restlets: Custom REST interfaces for specific needs. See NetSuite Restlets Documentation.
3. SOAP Web Services: The oldest NetSuite integration interface.  See NetSuite SOAP Web Services Documentation for more information.

Integration platforms like Boomi or Celigo.io leverage these interfaces to interact with NetSuite, facilitating data retrieval, insertion, and updates. In some cases, enhancing integration concurrency can be as straightforward as acquiring additional SuiteCloud Plus licenses, effectively increasing the number of allowed concurrent connections. For more on this, refer to NetSuite’s Concurrency Governance Limits.

For a visual representation of this concept, click the related image.

Enhancing Capabilities with NetSuite SuiteCloud Processors

Acquiring SuiteCloud Processors not only boosts your Integration Concurrency, as previously mentioned, but also equips you with additional capabilities for background processing. This includes running concurrently scheduled scripts and utilizing a Map/Reduce processor, which serves as a batch processing tool capable of managing multiple processing threads to increase throughput. An example of leveraging this background processing capability is implementing a ship notification service that automatically sends emails to customers for a batch of completed shipments.

To fully utilize these expanded capabilities, planning and application design is essential. This is particularly relevant for custom applications or third-party bundles not originally configured for background processing. Our experience indicates that some degree of re-architecting of these applications may be necessary to derive any benefit from SuiteCloud Processors, underscoring the importance of design considerations in optimizing these advanced NetSuite features. Bottom line: no free ride.

Click the related image to help see the concept more clearly.

Optimizing NetSuite Business Process Customizations

Enhancements to NetSuite’s native business logic are a critical area of focus due to concerns over performance impacts during load and save operations. We most often see clients wish for improved sales order processing experiences. Understanding and addressing these concerns involve considering three key areas:

1. NetSuite Database Performance: The performance of the NetSuite database is largely fixed, with limited direct control available to users. However, NetSuite’s Support can often resolve sudden performance dips, likely through backend optimizations such as index refinement.
2. Network Latency Issues: Network connectivity can significantly affect perceived performance. Issues such as congested WiFi or network configuration problems can make NetSuite services appear slow. A quick diagnostic tool is available by double-clicking the NetSuite logo on any webpage, providing immediate insights into processing times. These problems are generally resolvable with network adjustments. See related image.
3. Account Customizations and Third-Party Bundles: Diagnosing issues related to customizations or third-party bundles is more complex. Utilizing NetSuite’s Application Performance Monitor (APM) is advisable, although it requires a commitment to effectively leverage. The recommended strategy involves benchmarking record load and save times with all scripts disabled (preferably in a Sandbox environment), then gradually re-enabling customizations to pinpoint performance bottlenecks. Identifying areas for improvement requires a detailed understanding of the issues and a clear plan for resolution. For more on APM, visit the NetSuite Application Performance Monitor Documentation.

Consider viewing the related image for a more visual explanation of these concepts.

Video to Explore NetSuite Application Performance Insights

Chidi Okwudire from our Technology Services Management Practice has developed a comprehensive performance assessment video for the CIO of a major manufacturer with revenues of around $1 billion. The video is divided into two parts:

1. Part I (5:36): Chidi delves into the fundamental concepts previously mentioned, providing a foundational understanding of NetSuite application performance optimization.
2. Part II (6:05): Chidi introduces a less commonly known strategy to significantly enhance the return on investment in upgraded NetSuite infrastructure.

This video is invaluable for those looking to deepen their understanding of NetSuite’s performance capabilities and explore advanced optimization techniques.

Recommended NetSuite Enterprise Architecture for Scaling

To maximize the efficiency and capacity of your NetSuite infrastructure investment, we typically guide our clients through three pivotal infrastructure strategies:

1. Enhanced Concurrency: The focus here is to maximize data throughput into NetSuite with each integration effort. For instance, instead of inserting a single eCommerce order per call, why not bundle and insert 50 orders in one go? This approach involves initially depositing the data as a pre-processed batch to be subsequently unraveled and processed. This method significantly reduces the need for additional connections by maximizing the utility of existing ones.
2. Effective Utilization of NetSuite SuiteCloud Processors: Following the bulk insertion, these 50 orders can be individually segmented and processed as separate sales orders using SuiteCloud processors. These processors facilitate background operations, employing parallel processing strategies to input these orders efficiently into NetSuite’s database.
3. Business Process Automation Optimization: In tandem with the SuiteCloud processor’s operations, we focus on refining our clients’ business rule automation, particularly those designed for background processing. An approach exemplified in my 2018 article, Learn How to Build Scalable NetSuite Sales Order Practices, which highlights a rule and state-driven framework enabling organizations to operate on an exception-based model.

These strategies represent our architectural leadership, introducing the ‘acceptable latency’ concept to achieve higher transaction processing rates with lower infrastructure expenditure. This often involves reevaluating and potentially challenging the standard methodologies employed by out-of-the-box connectors from platforms like Celigo, as discussed in my article, Contrast Platform vs NetSuite Point-to-Point Integration Options.

Chidi expands on these strategies in Part II of the video, offering deeper insights into optimizing NetSuite’s infrastructure for scalability.

Optimizing NetSuite Applications and Infrastructure for Scale

The insights, visuals, and video provided above are designed to quickly orient business users or CIOs who are new to NetSuite toward understanding key scalability concepts. When Oracle NetSuite’s Sales Organization suggests upgrades, grasping these principles becomes crucial. Our practical experience has shown that simply increasing hardware or services does not directly translate to enhanced system performance.

Nevertheless, NetSuite’s architecture can handle substantial transaction volumes with thoughtful consideration and strategic planning.  Indeed, we can make NetSuite’s infrastructure scale.  The key lies not just in the infrastructure’s capacity but more so in how this infrastructure is leveraged and applied. Our firm is dedicated to assisting clients in navigating these considerations and developing comprehensive roadmaps to achieve optimal performance and maximize the return on their NetSuite investment.

If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you would like to get more out of your NetSuite infrastructure investment, let’s have a conversation.

Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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