What is Happening? — As 2012 marches to a close, a new focus on the enterprise Finance function is clearly taking place – with a range of viable and powerful Cloud-based solutions coming to market in support of upper-mid and large enterprises.

As our ongoing buyer demand research has consistently highlighted, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Collaboration (and to a lesser extent Social Networking) have clearly led in terms of early Cloud customer adoption (Wave I as shown in Figure 1). Following this flow, upper-mid-sized and large enterprises have begun to steadily embrace Cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions over the past two years (Wave II), as the first of several “core” systems of record being adopted in the Cloud.

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).