NetSuite, the Salesforce.com rival that Larry Ellison owns most of, is buying QuickArrow Inc, an Austin-based maker of cloud computing software for professional services businesses.

It's paying $20 million cash.

QuickArrow will be integrated into NetSuite's OpenAir business. NetSuite claims the combination will create North America's leading professional services automation (PSA) software company with more than 80,000 subscribers and a customer base that includes Symantec, Salesforce.com, Thompson Reuters, Genesys, Informatica, Proxicom, Siemens and Software AG.

The acquisition is meant to advance NetSuite's creation of a next-generation cloud computing application suite for services-based companies.

Last October it unveiled NetSuite Services Resource Planning (SRP), said to be the first cloud-based solution for managing a professional services business from marketing to project management, service delivery, billing, revenue management and driving repeat business from existing clients.

It figures SRP is promising to do for services businesses what SAP's R/3 software did for manufacturing in the early 90s. Adding QuickArrow is supposed to accelerate the development of SRP's capabilities to address large services-based businesses.

NetSuite said it will maintain QuickArrow's offices in Texas and support its current software. QuickArrow customers will not be required to migrate to NetSuite or OpenAir.

The transaction is not supposed to have a material impact on NetSuite's results this year and should be accretive in 2010.

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