Last week, at its SuiteCloud10 partner conference in San Francisco, NetSuite hosted its first-ever “Hairball” awards, honoring businesses that, thanks to cloud computing, were able to improve productivity, cut costs, and cough up the “hairball” of legacy solutions it once used.  A typical hairball might involve an on-demand solution for salesforce automation, an installed ERP product, a data warehouse solution, and of course a number of Excel spreadsheets for reporting. The awards were presented in a light-hearted, playful manner, and were prefaced by these two videos. (Warning: The videos contain some impolite jabs at NetSuite’s competitors SAP and Great Plains. In no way am I saying I agree with the content and this kind of marketing; I am posting them for entertainment purposes.)

Here are the first-ever Hairball Award winners…

Most Applications Replaced: After implementing NetSuite, MYCOM, a provider of OSS Service Assurance software, eliminated a 9 applications including Sage, Microsoft, Peachtree, and a proprietary quote systems. The company also got rid of 250+ spreadsheets.

Most Improved Productivity: Acquiring ten software companies left e-business solution provider KANA with a host of application hairballs. After implementing NetSuite OneWorld across the enterprise, Kana was able to close its finances in one-third the amount of time that it once took and reduced order processing times by 20 percent.

Greatest Cost Reduction: Once Fresh Produce Group untangled its business applications by moving on-demand, it saw net profit margins improve by 100 percent (within 18 months of deploying NetSuite). It estimates it saves $1 million a year through identifying and eliminating unnecessary overheads.

Most Global Solution: Also winning the best-dressed award of the evening, Filipino-influenced fast-food restaurant chain Jollibee has 1,800+ restaurants worldwide and was able to roll out one instance of NetSuite OneWorld.

Best Enterprise Deployment: Student accommodation company Campus Living Villages with its 170 subsidiaries once had nearly 40 ERP instances. After deploying NetSuite, however, it was able to standardize on a single Chart of Accounts.

Best Ecommerce Solution: Online retailer Virtual Inventories ended front-end and back-end solutions including Monster Commerce, Zen Cart, Volusion, StoneEdge, Pinnacle Cart, QuickBooks, Navision, Magento, and DepotNet with a single NetSuite implementation.

Best Manufacturing Company Solution: Engineered wood products company RedBuilt left SAP for NetSuite over just 86 days. It had worked with SAP for six years and never fully got it implemented.Its total cost of ownership shrank by nearly $300,000 annually with NetSuite over SAP.

Best Services Company Solution: Point-of-sale solution provider POSitive Technology untangled a hairball of Goldmine, QuickBooks Pro, MS Project and others with cloud computing.

Best Software Company Solution: TradeCard, a finance, supply chain collaboration and vendor compliance platform provider, replaced combination of Oracle, QuickBooks, Salesforce.com, Lotus Notes, and Excel all with NetSuite

Best Wholesaler/Distributor Solution: Ira Wood & Sons, a home improvement and outdoor superstore, once was working with more than 12 solutions including Prophet21, Hypercomm Terminal,  Monster Commerce, Unishippers Ship Manager, Worldship, NetStamps, NEC Elite IPK, ACD Plus, TimeClock Plus, QuickBooks Pro, and ExactforWeb. Moving to NetSuite allowed the retailer to streamline processes and focus on customer service.