NetSuite has announced the appointment of veteran technology exec Edward Zander to its board of directors.

Zander was most recently chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Motorola (News - Alert), and was with Sun Microsystems for 15 years before that, serving as president and chief operating officer. NetSuite officials say Zander will also serve on the Compensation Committee and the Nominating and Governance Committee of the Board.

"I am personally excited to have the opportunity to work with him again,” says Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite (News - Alert). “Cloud computing is the convergence of telecommunications, advanced data center capabilities, and great Web-native software.”

Zander has also worked as managing director of private equity fund Silver Lake Partners, vice president of marketing at Apollo Computer, and as an engineering and marketing executive with Data General. He is a member of the Board of Trustees at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a member of the Dean's Advisory Council of the School of Management at Boston University.

Zander has served on the board of directors of several technology companies, and in addition to NetSuite he serves on the board of directors of Netezza (News - Alert) Corp. and Seagate.

Earlier this month TMC reported thatCustomer Interaction Solutions magazine has named NetSuite CRM a recipient of a 2009 CRM Excellence Award.

NetSuite officials say the award recognizes "NetSuite's growing impact on companies looking for powerful, integrated Software as a Service business management." The CRM Excellence Awards, now in their tenth year, are based on each rated product's ability to extend and expand the customer relationship across the entire enterprise, and provide end-to-end customer life cycle management.

Last month TMC reported that NetSuite announced some of "the latest" companies to select NetSuite over software provided by SAP (News - Alert).

Distribution Video & Audio, GestureTek and Schaeffer Oil are now using NetSuite's enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and e-commerce offerings "in a single on-demand application... at a fraction of the cost and administrative overhead of SAP," company officials say.

The NetSuite officials cited "new research from Macro 4, a UK-based global software company," claiming to find "a high degree of risk and complexity involved in most major SAPupgrades," including "the bulk of historical data clogging up their systems... the time that upgrades consume, the complexity involved and the staffing resources involved." They also mentioned the July 2008 report by Forrester Research finding the tipping point toward SaaS (News - Alert) adoption is "the upgrade and application management requirements of on-premise" products, such as... oh, to pick a random example... SAP.