I’d never been to Suiteworld before, NetSuite’s user conference in San Jose, CA. In fact, the show was a first for RSR. By the company’s own admission, it has a brand new focus on the retail market, and it showed. I’m really glad I went.

What grabbed me most was founder Evan Goldberg’s day two keynote presentation. Having a CTO as company chairman has a lot of benefits to it, and one of the most profound from an analyst’s viewpoint is the ability to present deeply technical information (much of it forward-looking), while still maintaining the “big stage presenter ” feel. There’s no eloquent way to really articulate this: just that it’s refreshing to have a deep tech pitch from someone who understands the sales side of things and doesn’t get mired in speeds and feeds, is all. It’s a balance rarely found.

The big things? The company’s spending $50 million in R&D this year; nearly double what it spent in 2011. And their NetSuite Mobile product is about as cool as it gets. It’s currently in beta only for the iPhone, but it will available in the iTunes app store in a couple of months, and you have to see this thing to know how slick and user-friendly it is. Four main tabs run across the bottom of your mobile phone (home, calendar, leads and contacts), and as you drill down into any one the level of granularity is simply staggering. Goldberg walked the audience through user experiences changing sales orders, changing product estimates: all as easy as buying a book on Amazon. The crowd waited until he showed how it was multilingual until they burst into applause.

But for me, the little things were the real story here. They showed that designs are coming from users – from user feedback. In the full NetSuite product, for example, digital “stickies ” enable spontaneous, creative ideas to be quickly stored -and shared – without the danger of getting lost or thrown away that physical post-it notes present. And the ability to drag and drop information within NetSuite proved the crowd appreciated the little things, too. Goldberg hadn’t even gotten done showing how a user could drag an existing sales receipt right onto a corporate record before the crowd interrupted him with the loudest applause of the day.

Throughout the multi-hour presentation, Goldberg was joined by partners displaying how their newly-acquired products strengthened the suite. Joseph Funh, CEO of Tribe HR gave an impressive demonstration of his end-to-end “Social Human Recourses ” suite, whereby a new employee named Jesse was recruited, hired, on-boarded, promoted, and ultimately given a raise all within the NetSuite dashboard, and all within full view of his fellow employees – all the way up to the CEO. And then Patrick Grady, CEO and Atakan Cetinsoy, VP Product Management from Deem@work showed how easy a travel and expense report can be via “Jason’s ” demo (Jason knows which hotels he can choose from on his business trip to Chicago and gets the benefits of prenegotiated deals on anything he buys).

The thing NetSuite seemed most proud of was its growth, and I definitely get that. Even having never attended the event before, the fact that everything was bigger and more exciting than it was just 12 months ago came across in the show’s overall “vibe. ” Fewer defects despite growing users, more enhancements being delivered, faster performance, increasing uptime – they’ve got a really good story to tell. And retail just might be ready to reap a lot of the rewards from everything NetSuite has already learned from its manufacturing, services, and wholesale distribution efforts.

What was unfortunate is that much of the good could have easily gotten lost in the constant game of kick-our-competitors’-shins that NetSuite’s presenters felt compelled to play. I’ll spare the details here, but it was egregious, to say the least. I really hope they don’t pursue this tack much further, because it appears they have the type of thinking and technology capabilities retailers really DO want. But if there’s anything retailers DON’T want, it’s to be funding their vendors’ wildly expensive competitive marketing/bashing. Even the smartest of the big guys have stopped playing that game. Because to understand Retail 101 means to know that tight margins lead to subsequently tight tech budgets; the costs of these silly ego games get passed right along in the deal price, and everyone knows it.

It will be interesting to see how they fare with time.