Earlier today, Saugatuck had a good call with Jason Blessing, the new CEO at Plex Systems, who joined the company in early 2013. Saugatuck has been tracking Plex for more than 5 years – as we have long viewed it as an innovator in Cloud-based business software targeting primarily discrete manufacturing. While the firm has a strong heritage in the auto sector, we were pleased to hear that Jason has several new initiatives underway to help it not only strengthen the core but broaden the firm’s focus to appeal to other manufacturing sectors as well.

Jason was previously part of the leadership team at Taleo, which was acquired by Oracle in mid-2012. He brings to the job some very strong (and relevant) product and general management leadership skills, given his experience is creating, growing and scaling a Cloud-based apps business. As he explained in the call, in June 2012 the firm was acquired by Francisco Partners (from Apax), a San Fran based PE player. In December, an additional $30 million infusion was made by Accel Partners.

Earlier this morning, Saugatuck listened in to the hour-long NetSuite (NYSE: N) earnings call for 1Q2012, recorded after the market closed yesterday. While not a huge part of our research process, monitoring vendor financial performance and Wall Street perspectives are an important additional input to our research process – beyond our ongoing client interactions, deep-dive vendor briefings, and primary buyer-demand research.

Overall, NetSuite reported strong 1Q2012 results, and well ahead of consensus estimates – with revenues advancing 29.7 percent (to $69.3 million), billings growing 26 percent, and earnings reaching $0.06 EPS. More impressive is the fact that year-over-year and quarter-to-quarter comparisons were particularly challenging, given strong performance in 1Q2011 and 4Q2012. NetSuite’s CFO guided the Wall Street analysts on the call toward full-year revenues of $295-$300 million, which would represent 25-27 percent growth, with operating margins approaching 6.0 percent (up from 5.3 percent in 2011).