MYOB takes on NetSuite, looks beyond battle with Xero

MYOB has launched itself beyond small business SaaS territory with its first cloud ERP product aimed at the mid-market.

Called MYOB Advanced, officials said the AWS-hosted product has the company’s broadest feature and will go up against NetSuite.

MYOB is also talking up opportunities for software partners, with MYOB Advanced primed for integration through APIs, as well as for partners to customise the product.

While plenty of attention is on MYOB’s race with Xero and others for small business cloud customers, the mid-market for cloud ERP is “totally different”, said MYOB general manager of industry solutions Andrew Birch.

“It's highly fragmented. Probably the only [vendor] operating with a full SaaS-based solution of note is Netsuite,” he said. “We think we’ve come to market fairly early in this whole phase.”

MYOB invested in US technology company Acumatica last year, on whose technology it built MYOB Advanced.

Birch said MYOB invests approximately $30-$35 million per year on development, with a substantial amount of that going into this product over the year.

MYOB already has an on-premise ERP product called Exo, but MYOB Advanced has a broader feature set, Birch said.

There are three versions: Advanced Standard, Advanced Plus and Advanced Enterprise. As well as a general ledger, the product includes finance, distribution, job costing, customer management, project accounting, a “universal database search” of a whole business, inventory and order tracking, pricing, expenses, and synchronisation with contacts, tasks, appointments and emails.

MYOB’s small business accounting product, AccountRight Live, uses Microsoft Azure, while the new MYOB Advanced uses AWS, Birch said.

The product will be made available on iOS and Android, although a Windows Phone app is not on the roadmap, a spokesperson said.

MYOB also has a new “fully integrated” payroll solution planned, Birch said, which will be a separate product to MYOB’s existing Payglobal product.