Another Wellington software firm has been snapped up a big United States multinational.

Beetil, which employs six staff at its offices on Cambridge Terrace and was founded less than two years ago, has been bought for an undisclosed sum by Citrix, which is valued on the Nasdaq exchange at almost US$15 billion.

Chief executive Dan Lee, 39, along with the rest of Beetil's staff, are in Santa Barbara, California, where they will dine with Citrix executives tonight. Lee said he might find out then how Citrix had first become aware of the company.

"That is one of the things about the internet. You can build products in New Zealand and they can be easily discovered if you play your cards right, and things like this can happen."

Beetil makes service management tools that help corporations manage their information technology departments while Citrix produces software that lets companies run and support their desktop applications from a central location.

The Wellington firm was originally spun off from YouDo, which was founded by Lee and fellow Beetil shareholders Gregory Maddigan and Greig Robertson in 2007.

YouDo was also in the service management business and directly supported several companies including Meridian Energy and an unnamed European supermarket chain, posting revenues of $2 million in 2009. But Lee told BusinessDay in an interview then that its biggest opportunity lay in selling software that encapsulated its expertise, rather than the more labour-intensive field of supporting IT departments itself.

He said today the sale to Citrix gave Beetil a "vast pool of resources" it could draw on while continuing to develop its products in Wellington. "The team remains 'as is'. We are still going to be in New Zealand for the foreseeable future."

- © Fairfax NZ News