Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company’s Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for “multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency” enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite’s SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP . Sponsor The suite’s features include: multi-site planning and management, material requirements planning (MRP), production management, engineering change control (ECC), shop floor control and work-in-progress (WIP) management. Netsuite and Rootstock’s joint product , originally called Rootstock MRP for NetSuite, has been beta since April 2009. Launched in 2009, SuiteCloud is Netsuite’s platform as a service offering. Rootstock, founded in 2008, was one of the platform’s early adopters. According to a press release , the company was able to bring Rootstock MRP for NetSuite to market twice as fast and at half the cost as would have been otherwise possible. SAP is the dominant player in enterprise manufacturing software, so this product brings Netsuite directly onto SAP’s turf. SAP meanwhile is readying its SaaS offering Business ByDesign , which will compete directly with Netsuite in the SMB market. Netsuite has been aggressively positioning themselves as a SAP competitor and CloudSuite has been seen as a competitor to both SAP and Oracle (Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison is a majority shareholder and major financial backer of Netsuite). Netsuite Manufacturing Edition will also compete with manufacturing ERP SaaS provider Plex . Discuss

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