This week sees me stateside for a whirlwind four day trip. I’m here to participate in SuiteCloud, NetSuite’s annual partner conference (disclosure – NetSuite covered my expenses in attending this event). I’m really looking forward to spending some facetime with some people I have much to talk about with. In particular I’ll be having sessions with Zach Nelson and Evan Goldberg , CEO and CTO respectively. With them I really want to talk about their apparent moves over the past six months or so to move NetSuite up the food chain, gradually building out the functionality, partnerships and processes that sees them become a viable option for larger and larger businesses.

In something of special interest to me, I’ll also be meeting with APAC Managing Director Chris Schaeffer. APAC is a surprisingly large growth area for Cloud Computing and I’m looking forward to talking with Schaeffer about the reasons for this and the difficulties trying to sell into a market that is both geographically spread out but also one which has a huge number of different languages and cultures.

I’ll also be speaking with NetSuite customers – their perspective and stories are, after all, more valid than any marketing spin from within the company can ever be – I’ll be running interviews where possible to tell some customer stories after the event.

Lastly I’ll be attending the NetSuite awards – while these functions can have the tendency of being lovefests with a preponderance of tuxedos and champagne (for reference, I don’t own a tux and don’t drink champagne), NetSuites attempts over the past 12 month to build a large and robust partner channel will mean that these awards will be really interesting to watch.