Published on the 25/06/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Creating ERP solutions for mid-market customers is work “for masochists” according to Greentree CEO Peter Dickinson…
Greentree, which claims more than 1,000 such organisations use its business management software to run their operations, is focused purely on the mid-market which, according to Dickinson, is often misunderstood.
Without the budget of an enterprise level customer, but needing more flexibility than small enterprises which could often use out of the box solutions, Dickinson said that “Greentree and companies in this sector must be masochists.”
Whatever the motivation, it is still a fiercely competed space with Greentree regularly going up against everyone from SAP to Sage, Microsoft to NetSuite.
Auckland based, Greentree has its business software platform installed in more than 1,000 sites worldwide, with the majority in Australia. Some of these serve multiple users (for example one site provides business software as a service for pharmacists, another for dentists) which is how Dickinson gets to the 1,000 user organisation figure.
The company is progressively rolling out Greentree4, a revamped version of the system which allows browser based access from mobile devices. The sales module was the first to be updated late last year, and this week Dickinson announced Greentree4 eDocs – an automated document management system which uses a third party cloud service to scrape information from paper based documents such as invoices or receipts and load that data directly into Greentree.
The company cited research from the Aberdeen Group which claimed that while it typically cost $US16.33 to manually process an invoice, it cost just $US5.65 if the process was automated.
Stripping costs out of the business is a key issue for most SMEs.
However that has not yet involved a wholesale migration of Greentree customers to the cloud. Dickinson – a confirmed cloud sceptic who has in the past described some cloud vendors as “sandal waving zealots” reaffirmed that the company had no plans to offer Greentree as a service itself, but that the software could be hosted on third party clouds if customers wished. He said that a survey of Australian customers had uncovered about 100 companies which were using a cloud hosted version of the product, hosted in 30 different data centres.
Bruce Rayment, CEO of Halifax Vogel Group, which distributes construction products across Australia has been using the Greentree software since 2006, and is currently using an in house version of the software and has no plans to move off the platform for at least a decade. However Rayment said that; “when the server comes to the end of life we will look at cloud.”
