At Oracle CloudWorld Tour Dubai 2025, Nicky Tozer, Senior Vice President, Europe, Middle East and Africa and Youssef Halawi, Regional Sales Director, Oracle NetSuite, sat down with Rabab Zehra, Executive Editor of TECHx Media to discuss how the cloud pioneer’s solutions are enabling businesses in the UAE and the broader GCC region to scale and streamline their operations. The conversation focused on the unique challenges faced by local businesses, the innovative solutions provided by NetSuite, and future opportunities in the region.
TECHx: Are there any specific advantages that NetSuite offers to businesses in the UAE or the region?
Nicky Tozer: One key advantage is that NetSuite offers a unified business platform where businesses can access all their operational data in one place. This results in a single version of the truth, helping to drive efficiency, productivity and decision-making. Moreover, for companies looking to expand internationally, such as UAE businesses operating across the GCC, NetSuite’s OneWorld solution allows seamless management of multi-currency, multi-country operations.
Youssef Halawi: Another growing trend we are seeing here in the UAE is evolving business models, combining product and service offerings. NetSuite’s flexibility supports this transition, making it easier for companies to manage the complexity of both operations simultaneously.
TECHx: How does NetSuite help support the growth of local businesses in the UAE and the GCC region?
Youssef Halawi: The trend we’re seeing in the region is that businesses are increasingly looking to adopt best practices across all their business operations. NetSuite fits well in this environment by offering out-of-the-box solutions tailored to industry-specific best practices, such as accounting standards. Indeed, we tailor our solutions to the specific needs of businesses in the region. We’ve observed a shift toward adopting global best practices, which makes NetSuite a perfect fit. NetSuite helps customers implement these practices faster, which allows them to derive value from the system more quickly.
Nicky Tozer: Our “SuiteSuccess” methodology comes into play here. With over 41,000 customers globally, we’ve built out-of-the-box processes for various industries, which our customers can implement with minimal customization. This leads to faster deployments and quicker returns for all our customers.
TECHx: Can you share some examples of local businesses and industries benefiting from NetSuite?
Youssef Halawi: Absolutely. One of our prominent UAE customers is eZhire, which is running its business on NetSuite in order to revolutionise the car rental industry. We also cater to various industries such as retail, construction, hospitality, and technology. Each industry in the region has its unique needs, and NetSuite’s flexibility allows us to meet them effectively. We also see significant adoption in growing industries like beauty and retail.
TECHx: How does NetSuite help ensure its solutions are customized to each client while adhering to best practices?
Nicky Tozer: We focus on providing pre-built, industry-specific processes that are aligned with best practices. While we minimize customizations to ensure a faster implementation, there’s always flexibility to adjust the solution if a customer requires something unique. The key is ensuring clients benefit from the system quickly while avoiding overly complex customizations that might increase costs and time.
TECHx: How does NetSuite differentiate itself from competitors, especially with the rise of AI?
Nicky Tozer: NetSuite is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which gives our customers access to cutting-edge AI and cloud technologies that aren’t typically available to small and medium-sized businesses. This infrastructure also helps businesses scale like larger enterprises.
We believe AI is as good as the data you feed it. And the best data comes from a unified suite where your data across all your core business functions are integrated from accounting and financials to sales and marketing to customer support, and that plays to NetSuite’s strengths. The more comprehensive and complete your business data is, the more relevant information the large language models have, the more effective your AI can be.
We’ve also just announced the launch of NetSuite Text Enhance for our customers in the UAE. Text Enhance can help our UAE customers leverage relevant, company-specific data to create and refine content that is contextual and personalized, and can draw from finance and accounting, HR, supply chain and operations, sales and marketing data, and more.
TECHx: You mentioned enhancing the user experience. Can you elaborate on that?
Nicky Tozer: Yes, we’ve recently made significant improvements to the user experience with our Redwood design system. This change allows for cleaner, sharper interfaces and an easier way to interact with the system. Moving forward, we plan to incorporate more AI-driven interactions where users can request data using plain language, making it even easier to use. We’ve also introduced NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, enabling users to combine data from various sources for faster and more insightful reporting, all within the suite.
TECHx: What does the future hold for NetSuite users, especially as their businesses grow?
Nicky Tozer: The beauty of NetSuite is that there’s always room for growth. As businesses expand, NetSuite continues to offer more capabilities, from financial reporting to CRM and advanced analytics. It’s a journey that starts small but can grow as your business needs evolve. NetSuite ensures that users can continuously unlock more value from the system.
In the rapidly evolving business landscape of the UAE and GCC, NetSuite is a powerful, adaptable solution that empowers businesses to streamline operations, scale efficiently, maximize new opportunities, and stay ahead of the competition.