The company, which went public in December of 2007, has set the standard for all-in-one hosted business applications, and that dominance makes competing difficult.

According to BizAutomation (bizautomation.com), which is in the process of launching its own all-in-one software as a service package, the cost of NetSuite's services puts it out of the range of a certain segment of small businesses. And it is that market that BizAutomation intends to target with its new service.

The company has spent more than five years developing the solution, which is in beta format until it officially launches February 16. The SaaS solution automates business processes and eliminating some of the barriers of information typically found in organizations that run multiple business applications.

"We're still back in the '80s when it comes to sharing data for applications," says Carl Zaldivar, president and CEO of BizAutomation. "Almost everybody has Quickbooks for accounting, something like Salesforce for CRM, something like X-Cart for e-commerce, and email. It's just complete madness. The right solution is to have one product that does it all from one location."

The BizAutomation product offers modules comparable to those found in NetSuite, including sales, support, marketing, accounting, contracts, surveys, project management, business and partner portals, e-commerce with support for FedEx, UPS and USPS shipping and inventory with support for multiple warehouses and serialization.

The suite also offers full integration with Office, and Exchange 2007 both on-premise or on-demand from service provider partnerships, which BizAutomation will soon announce.

Zaldivar says BizAutomation will attempt to offer an alternative to NetSuite at a considerably lower cost, priced at $49.95 per user per month, along with a one-time setup fee of $1,500.

According to Zaldivar, NetSuite's reign over the market has gone relatively unchallenged for so long because of the barriers to entry into the all-in-one application market, which discourage providers from even trying.

"[There's] a barrier if you're too small to get funding to do all of this," says Zaldivar. "From the other side, you've got a natural business barrier: if you're making a lot of money selling Microsoft CRM, and then up-selling the e-commerce module and all these other things, and you're relying on a partner channel to make all this happen, why would you shoot yourself in the foot by putting it all together and selling it as one product for $50 per user per month?"

Despite being in beta, BizAutomation already has some paid customers on board - a couple of whom are former NetSuite customers, says Zaldivar. But he says his company's marketing budget is meager in comparison to the competitor and does not expect to grow too quickly or take over a significant chunk of NetSuite's business any time soon.

"We're targeting small business because that's the type of company that typically needs all-in-one, in a simple to use fashion," says Zaldivar. "For the third or quarter of the cost of NetSuite and the training time, which is going to be a lot less, we're able to satisfy the needs of small businesses."