Around 100 mid-sized New Zealand businesses gathered at the Park Hyatt in Auckland on 8 September for MYOB Forward: The Future of AI and ERP. A good number of them were Verde clients running MYOB Greentree, several of them for well over a decade.
The billed topic was AI. But the question most people walked in with had nothing to do with AI, and MYOB knew it.
The question in the room
Valantis Vais, MYOB's General Manager of Product and Product Marketing, dealt with it before he touched a single AI slide. He told the room that when he meets customers running on-premise solutions, the first question he is always asked is what the future of their product looks like, and he wanted to clear it off everyone's mind before moving on.
He opened with a show of hands. Five years or more on the same solution, most of the room. Ten years, still most of the room. Fifteen years. Twenty years. Hands were still up. His response was to ask everyone to applaud themselves, on the basis that picking a platform you can run the heart of your business on for two decades is a genuinely hard decision to get right.
That framing matters, because what followed was not a sales scare.
What MYOB confirmed
Three things were stated plainly.
MYOB is not walking away from mid-sized businesses. Vais pointed to 35 years supporting mid-market businesses across Australia and New Zealand, and said MYOB is committed to continuing that for the foreseeable future.
Greentree releases will continue. Exo and Greentree will keep receiving releases. What changes is what those releases contain. Vais described three categories that will keep coming: updates that keep the platform current with underlying technology such as the database layer, enhancements that keep your data secure, and updates that keep you compliant with regulatory change.
What stops is new capability. In his words, "what those releases will not carry is innovation". His reasoning was economic and practical rather than strategic: innovation on older platforms becomes expensive as fewer customers remain on them, and the underlying technology, along with the pool of people who understand it, gets harder to access over time.
He was direct about the consequence for everything demonstrated later that morning. MYOB will keep Greentree compliant and secure, but the AI capabilities shown on stage are being built for the cloud platform and will not be coming back to Greentree.
The slide that got the most attention
MYOB used a software lifecycle curve titled "MYOB Exo and MYOB Greentree", running through innovation, growth, high performance, end of life and end of support. A marker labelled "Today" sat past the peak, in the performance stability part of the high performance phase.
Vais described it as a natural lifecycle that every software product moves through, and said Exo and Greentree have reached the point where they continue to meet businesses' existing needs but cannot take advantage of newer technology.
What MYOB did not say
This is the part worth being precise about, because we have already had calls about it.
No end-of-support date was announced. None. Not a year, not a window, not a hint. MYOB confirmed the direction of travel and confirmed that innovation has moved to the cloud, but nobody in that room was given a deadline.
So if you are running Greentree, your system is supported, it is being kept secure, and it will keep meeting your compliance obligations. What changed is that the roadmap conversation is now explicit rather than implied, and you can plan against it on your own timeline instead of guessing.
Why the timing question is coming up now
One statistic from MYOB's research landed harder than the lifecycle slide. In a study of more than 1,000 mid-sized businesses across Australia and New Zealand, conducted with Oxford Economics, 75% of decision makers said they plan to upgrade their ERP within the next two years. Vais admitted that was higher than MYOB expected given how long businesses typically stay on an ERP.
He also made a point we thought was fair, and one we would make ourselves. Businesses moving off on-premise systems now are not early adopters taking a risk on unproven technology, and they are not the last ones standing either. Cloud ERP is mature, AI capability in ERP is real enough to demonstrate live, and there is a body of experience to draw on. He called it a Goldilocks moment. Second wave, not bleeding edge.
What we are seeing at Verde
"What struck me in the room was how many people have run their business on the same platform for fifteen or twenty years, and how level headed they were about all of this. Nobody was panicking about AI. The questions our Greentree clients ask us are practical ones. What does this actually mean for my team, what do I need to sort out first, and how much time have I got? Our job is to answer those honestly rather than rush anyone into a decision they have not had time to think about."
Juanita Potgieter, Verde Group
The rest of the morning, briefly
The bulk of the programme covered where AI is genuinely creating value in mid-sized businesses, how ERP platforms are evolving to support it, and live demonstrations of AI capability running inside a cloud ERP. Rather than describe those here, we have included the demonstration footage below so you can judge it yourself.
More demonstrations shown on the day -
Visit our MYOB Acumatica Practice, Avanza Solutions for more information - Avanza Solutions | MYOB Acumatica Partner
MYOB Forward as a pathway
Vais closed by walking through MYOB Forward, the pathway MYOB has built specifically for Exo and Greentree customers moving to the cloud. Two details are worth knowing.
The first is volume. MYOB has moved 547 businesses through this pathway, with most going live within a six to nine month window, longer for more complex implementations.
The second is continuity, and it is the point we would emphasise most. The pathway is designed so that the partner who already knows your setup stays with you through the move. You are not handing your business to an implementation team starting from a blank sheet of paper. For our Greentree clients, that means us.
The process runs in four stages: plan, design, implement, succeed. The plan stage was described as the one people skip at their peril, because it is where you get clear on why you are moving at all. Vais was emphatic that this is a business project rather than an IT project.
What we would suggest doing next
If you attended, you will have your AI readiness score from the workshop. If you did not, there is no urgency created by anything MYOB said last week. But there are three sensible things to do in the next quarter.
- Write down your own timeline. Not MYOB's. How many more years do you need Greentree to serve you, and what has to be true for that to work?
- Separate the compliance question from the capability question. Greentree will stay compliant and secure. The question is whether standing still on capability costs you anything over your planning horizon.
- Have the conversation before you need to. The businesses that moved well are the ones that planned it, not the ones that reacted to a deadline.
If you would like to talk any of this through, including what your specific Greentree environment would involve, get in touch. No pitch, no pressure.
Frequently asked questions
Is MYOB Greentree end of life? No. MYOB has not announced an end-of-life or end-of-support date for MYOB Greentree. At MYOB Forward Auckland in September 2026, MYOB confirmed Greentree will continue to receive releases covering platform currency, security and regulatory compliance.
Will MYOB keep supporting MYOB Greentree? Yes. MYOB stated it remains committed to supporting mid-sized businesses and that Exo and Greentree releases will continue. What those releases will not include is new innovation.
Will AI features be added to MYOB Greentree? No. MYOB confirmed that its AI investment is focused on its cloud platform. The AI capabilities demonstrated at the event will not be brought into Greentree.
Did MYOB give a date for Greentree end of support? No date was given at the Auckland event.
Do I need to move off MYOB Greentree now? No immediate action is required. The decision comes down to your own planning horizon and whether the pause on new capability affects your business over that period.
