Ellison-founded sailing league SailGP plumps for Oracle NetSuite to expand

SailGP, a sailing racing league founded by Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison and champion sailor Russell Coutts, has picked Oracle NetSuite to expand its activities.

SailGP is in its third season and features nine national teams competing in identical F50 foiling catamarans.

Ellison is well known as a sailing enthusiast. He famously skipped his own keynote at Oracle Cloud World in San Francisco in 2013 to watch Oracle Team USA win the 34th America’s Cup.

Hasso Plattner, founder and chairman of arch-rival SAP, is also keen on sailing, and was described, in 2009, on website Sail World as a “damned good sailor”.

According to a statement from Oracle NetSuite, the league Ellison co-founded needed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that would streamline its global financial functions and make it more efficient as it expands.

It has a growing international event schedule, boat-building facilities, and is looking to expand its design and manufacturing division. It is aiming to double in size within two years.

It has a fairly typical wish list of gaining real-time visibility into its operations, automating business processes and improving decision-making – and selected NetSuite to do so. Computer Weekly has asked what SailGP used before, as an ERP, and will update this article with that detail, should we get it.

Julie Boyd, director of finance at SailGP, said: “SailGP has ambitious targets to bring the sport to new places and audiences, and data is critical to both the race crews and internal teams on that journey.

“With our targets come a need for tight control of finances, compliance, cash flow visibility and insight to advise the business where to navigate next. NetSuite gives us that ability. NetSuite enables us to report, plan and run multiple potential scenarios, and this helps our finance team advise on strategy, areas of efficiency and cost saving.”

For the supplier, David Rodman, senior vice-president of global customer success at Oracle NetSuite, added: “With exciting opportunities and sustainability objectives in its future, SailGP needed a unified financial system that could tackle the complexity of multi-country, multi-faceted operations.

“With NetSuite, SailGP has a system that can automate many of its financial processes while delivering real-time insights.” 

According to its own statement, NetSuite has enabled SailGP to streamline financial reporting, improve forecasting, and address its tax and reporting requirements in the countries it operates in. The league plans to adopt NetSuite CRM and inventory management to manage the sale and production of technical innovations. 

With regards to sailing operations, SailGP uses Oracle Stream Analytics and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to capture and transmit data from 30,000 data points to deliver real-time racing metrics. These, it is said, enable teams to build their optimal in-race strategies on the water and improve the viewing experience for fans.