Published on the 19/11/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The introduction of the first elements of Greentree4 which allows browser-based access to the ERP platform has delivered the impetus for the New Zealand company to tackle the US market…
With 75-80 percent of the company’s $NZ15 million in annual revenues already coming from overseas (the majority in Australia with a peppering of sales in other markets including the UK and South Africa) New Zealand’s Greentree International is now planning further international expansion. CEO Peter Dickinson, in launch events in Auckland and Sydney over the past week, said that although it had been possible to launch in the UK with the previous version of its business management software, the company wanted to wait for the release of Greentree4 before tackling the US.
Initially, the company has implemented the new version 4 capabilities in the sales/service module; Dickinson admitted it would take about two years to complete the rollout of Greentree4 in its entirety.
Greentree has already spent three years on the overhaul of the product, which has cost the company close to $NZ20 million. The company received some assistance from the Callaghan Innovation fund after Greentree was awarded a $NZ2.65 million grant in 2013. Greentree4 can be operated in the cloud, on premise or in a hybrid deployment. It allows for mobile access on any device through HTML5.
Users however are responsible for deciding how much of the Greentree4 functionality they turn on and how they wish to configure their own desktops. “This brings forward disruptive technology to customers without the disruption,” said Dickinson.
The company claims 10,000 companies use the system worldwide, and it has ambitions this year for 25 percent growth. But Dickinson acknowledged that the mid-market business management software market was fiercely contested, with the company battling everyone from SAP to Sage to Microsoft.
“In the deals we have lost we have come up against 71 different products,” said Dickinson.
ERP vendors are increasingly also coming up against cloud-based solutions. While Greentree is agnostic about how its system is deployed, it does not offer a hosted version itself – leaving that to its channel partners or customers.
To date Dickinson said only one in 20 sales was a cloud solution. He was surprisingly dismissive of cloud-based solutions as a competitor.
“We have had NetSuite users come across to Greentree where the money they were going to spend implementing (our system) was less than the NetSuite fee for a year,” he said.
However a Greentree on premise deal would still be booked as a capital rather than operating expense, and the end user would be responsible for its management and maintenance. Nevertheless Dickinson said, “we don’t see the need for a Greentree managed service for everyone in the world,” adding that many cloud vendors were “sandal waving zealots”.
