Sold: MYOB snaps up NZ ERP provider Greentree in $28.5m deal

MYOB has snapped up New Zealand's Greentree for NZ$28.5 million in a deal designed to help the cloud-based business management vendor drive into larger enterprises with an integrated enterprise resource planning and payroll offering.

MYOB says it will leverage Greentree's 'considerable' large company expertise and provide its online capabilities to the current Greentree product range.

Greentree provides enterprise resource planning software to more than 850 larger businesses – with 100 to 1000 employees – across New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

"The Greentree acquisition enables MYOB to further extend its mid-market leadership into larger enterprise business offerings and apply its marketing and distribution resources to accelerate growth through the existing Greentree channel," MYOB says.

The deal has been done via an acquisition of Hei Matau Holdings 2000, the ultimate shareholder of the Greentree group of companies.

Tim Reed, MYOB chief executive, says the acquistion is in line with MYOB's strategy of targeting value-add acquisition to complement organic growth. The deal continues a string of Kiwi acquisitions for MYOB, which bought BankLink in 2013, PayGlobal in 2014 and Ace Payroll and IMS Payroll in 2015.

"Greentree is a quality business and has a very experienced team who collectively bring a wealth of knowledge and experience in the evolving ERP sector," Reed says.

"We're thrilled with the growing prominence of MYOB in the ERP space," he adds, noting that 2015 saw the addition of MYOB Advanced to its EXO Business product line.

"MYOB will be the first to market with an integrated online ERP and payroll solution for bigger businesses. The acqusition of Greentree further reinforces our commitment to bigger businesses in Australia and New Zealand and expands our ERP product suite to establish MYYOB as a dominant leader in the mid-market.

Greentree's offerings are primarily sold on a perpetual basis with annual maintenance.

Peter Dickinson, Greentree chief executive, labelled the acquisition 'a compelling partnership' allowing Greentree to leverage MYOB's significant scale and resource to tap into new markets.

"This is… a great opportunity to work closely with MYOB to develop and deliver the leading online and on-premise ERP solutions that our clients need to successfully stay ahead in a rapidly changing world," Dickinson says.

MYOB's Enteprise Solutions division, which provides ERP and human resource management software to more than 7000 customers, is a growing part of the company's business, bringing in AU$41 million of revenue in FY15 on the back of the succesful integration of PayGlobal and the launch of MYOB Advanced.

The division's customers are primarily in the 20 to 500 employee market.