OpenAir is a robust PSA. There are many great project management features that can drive task management, timesheets, expenses, billing, forecasting, and resource management. OpenAir is highly customizable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Account Management - The Oracle NetSuite account management team is the worst vendor our company deals with annually. Buying a used car is less painful than simply renewing our services annually or adding a new license. Keeping happy customers is not their priority. Pricing is always discounted, but discounts seem arbitrary and made up. Account management appears to be managed out of the Philippines and it often takes days to get a reply from our account manager. Every year, you must negotiate via your account manager who has no authority to approve any pricing and must go to someone else and get approval for everything. Your cost could jump 20% year-to-year with no changes to your service. We started with a 70% discount from the list price (with a 3% annual escalation cap for the first few years). After that initial period, it's the wild west on pricing. In our latest renewal, our account manager suggested we reduce our license count to our current utilization level (makes sense), yet the resulting price she came up with by eliminating 15 licenses was effectively the same price as keeping our license count as-is... How does that make sense? If you make any reductions in service, you "lose" any discounts and must start over negotiations. Also, with the proposed reduction in licenses we would then be at our max user count, and to add additional licenses between your renewals, we would have to negotiate pricing on those licenses separately. To simply add one user license, it may take weeks to get it added. Doing business with Oracle Netsuite is a challenge. If only pricing were straightforward and managed in a portal.
Reporting - OpenAir reporting is highly technical. If you are an engineer that understands the back end database, it can sometimes make sense. Even then, most of the time you are forced to export data from OpenAir into Excel and work the data to get the reports you want. There are very few default reports that are helpful. You would think for a project management tool that there would be basic reports for common functions, but that is not the case. Everything must be created and built and hope that they can meet your needs.
Integration - During the sales process, integration was glossed over. "A simple export and bam it's in to QuickBooks, quick and easy." Lies! When OpenAir had a standard QuickBooks integration (they no longer do), it worked poorly - we ended up not using it because it was not reliable. OpenAir is an enterprise system and a robust integration project is required to connect it to whatever system you use for billing. This can drastically increase your deployment costs, so be careful to get all the facts before starting an implementation of OpenAir. API access is not included and is an additional cost.
Configuration - OpenAir has hundreds of "internal switches" that one must know about and work with support to enable or disable. There is some configuration you can perform without contacting support; however, it's hard to understand your configuration options unless you do research in support libraries with a specific need. This makes implementing and making changes to OpenAir on your own difficult (but not impossible). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
